


Apocalypse Song

by waspabi



Category: One Direction (Band), Radio 1 RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-19 22:25:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 50,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1486330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waspabi/pseuds/waspabi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As it turns out, the apocalypse isn’t all action scenes and handheld camera shots. It’s boiling water, and dodging vitamin deficiencies, and trying to get lube out of the sheets. </p><p>Or, a year after a lethal virus wipes out nearly all of the world’s population, Harry and his found family build a life with what they have left. </p><p>Or, a post-apocalyptic curtain fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apocalypse Song

**Author's Note:**

> This began life, as many stories do, as a little tumblr fic, but then like a science fiction parasite it burrowed into my brain and lodged there, leaking melodrama all over my frontal lobe. Resistance was pointless, of course, so here we are. 
> 
> I've always been interested in apocalyptic stories, although I would always find myself with lingering questions like, "Is a city still a city without people?" or, "But how do they dispose of their waste?". This fic was, in part, my attempt to answer those questions. 
> 
> So many thanks are due to Catie, who held my hand through this whole thing and kept me from losing it about every thousand words; Bee, who heroically deciphered my abstract texts into tangible solutions; Nancy, the recipient of many long emails about well maintenance and medieval waste disposal; and Serena, for the absolutely pro beta in record time. Also, she named the chickens. 
> 
> You can find a soundtrack [here](http://8tracks.com/upontrees/songs-for-the-end-of-the-world).
> 
> Notes: Everyone in this story is AU except for Nick and Fiona. I tried, but I couldn't part them from radio.
> 
> As for warnings, this tale is definitely heavy in parts, but there's absolutely no violence, major character deaths, or really much at all by way of discussion of death or illness or injury in general. There's one or two allusions to bodies in passing. There's a chase scene, and at one point there's suggestion of PTSD. Also, there's a healthy amount of discussion regarding human waste and also mould.

 

 

 

> > The pulled-apart world scatters its bad news like a brush fire, the ink bleeds out the day’s undoing and here we are again: alive. The tributary of this riverine dark widens into the mind’s brief break. Let the flood come, the rowdy water beasts are knocking now and now. What’s left of the woods is closing in. Don’t run. Open your mouth big to the rising and hope to your god your good heart knows how to swim. 
>> 
>> Ada Limon, Flood Coming

 

The old world heaves her last breaths in the memories of the living. Harry feels like he’s burying it all: rushing ahead as time heaps dirt over the fury of an electric drill on a Saturday morning and drowns the yellow glow of an open refrigerator door at midnight. If there are any babies toddling into this new era, they won’t remember what it feels like to swipe their Oyster card or walk through the iridescent puddle of a streetlight at dusk. They’ll read books full of words they don’t know like _internet_ and _crowd_. 

The end of the world doesn’t look like it does in films. Harry suspects the lighting. 

The apocalypse is _dark_. Cara was smart and lifted half of Diptyque back in the first days of the plague, but they’ve been powerless for a year now. Most of the big shops are in gang territory, and probably ransacked, besides. Torches are a temporary luxury: batteries are rarer than diamonds these days, and more precious. At night the housemates gather in the lounge and light a fire. The epidemic and what came after shrunk Harry’s whole world to this firelit lounge, two gently used sofas and the nine people sat around them. 

The other thing the apocalypse can be is _boring._ Harry never knew how much time there was to fill until the power went out. During the day they occupy hours scavenging abandoned supermarkets and soaking muddy clothes in half-baths of pond water and Dettol to get out the worst of the muck, but the sun sets earlier and earlier now that winter sets it. Luckily, whoever lived here Before liked card games. 

Cara thwacks her card onto the stack and beams across the circle at Harry. “Hearts are trumps,” she crows. “The trick is mine.” They’re a team, so Harry gets to gloat too, which is one of his favourite things. 

Louis grudgingly turns his card over. “Rubbish.” 

Cara rolls her eyes. “You only say it’s rubbish because you haven’t scored one trick.” 

“I do not.” Louis puts his deck face-down on the rug and scowls. “We should play something else next.” 

From her sprawl on the sofa, Perrie pokes Louis in the arm with her sock foot. “You only just started!” 

Louis holds onto his glower with the bullheaded determination that has bolstered him thus far. “Yeah, well, it’s getting old already. Cara cheats.” 

Cara squints at him. “And _how_ can I cheat, exactly?” 

“I don’t _know_ , do I? Or I’d be doing it myself!” 

“Oh, _that’s_ nice,” Cara drawls, sitting back and folding her long colt legs. She leans back to shift the fire, poking at the sticks until they puff up again with little licks of flame, like the breath of baby dragons.

Harry sighs and straightens his hand. Once they get going, there’s no telling when they’ll find their way back to the actual game. 

“It’d just a fair playing field, then. Now it’s like pitting a rhinoceros against a little kitten.” Louis looks at Harry as if for confirmation. Harry courageously stares at the floor and avoids eye contact.

It sounds a bit as if Cara has dislodged her body weight in phlegm as she snorts. “The thought of _you_ as a little kitten —” 

Perrie waves her foot in the direction of the card game. “Tommo, I’ll swap in for you if you don’t want to play.” 

Louis pushes Perrie's foot back towards the sofa. “I want to play, I just don’t want to play when someone’s blatantly cheating. _Cara_.” 

Cara folds her arms until she's mostly sharp elbow and eyebrow. “Again, _how_ , but also, you’re just annoyed because you _want_ to cheat but you _can’t_.” 

“Do not,” Louis says, folding his arms. “I’m a man of honour. Truth and justice and honour and all that bollocks, dead queen and remains of country, that’s me.” 

Harry snorts, which makes Louis glower in his direction until Perrie laughs outright. “Sorry, but _who_ taught us how to play poker by the wrong rules, again?” 

Louis scoffs. “That’s entirely unproven, thanks, Pezza.” 

“We found an instruction booklet,” Zayn points out. 

Louis throws his arms up, affronted. “Semantics!”  

Zayn nudges Harry’s arm and Harry sighs, because they’ve had this argument every night for the last month, practically. Cara is brilliant at bridge. Louis keeps trying to get her to swap back to poker, but even then Perrie would take the pot. Perrie has proven to be an unnervingly good bluffer. Louis will be happier when it’s warm again and they can play football. 

“ _Well_ , Zayn,” Harry nods down at Zayn’s open hand, sorted by suit and splayed in a fan, “I’d say Louis didn’t have to worry about his score, ‘cos his partner is no _dummy_ , but…” 

Zayn just blinks at him. 

Harry motions to the cards again. “Dummy? Because your hand is the dummy in this trick? And you’re partners?” 

Niall tosses an old sock their way. It slaps distressingly against Harry’s cheek and he cries out, turning his most betrayed expression towards Niall’s sofa. 

“Soz, mate. Meant to hit Tommo.” 

Other words Harry would like to nominate for the apocalypse include _smelly_ and _unsanitary._  

“Look at that sad little puppy face.” Gemma reaches down from her armchair to squeeze Harry’s cheeks, shaking his jaw from side to side. “Remember how that used to work a treat?” 

Harry shakes her off, swatting at her hands like flies. 

Gemma cackles. “Truth hurts, sucker.” 

“So does a poke in the eye.” Harry tries to wiggle up to jab at her face.

Liam peers his bearded face in from the kitchen. Very old man of the mountain, is Liam. “I’m doing a brew, anyone want?” 

“Fi would say we should save the supply,” Gemma notes, shifting away from Harry’s hands and turning back to her book. 

“Yeah, well.” Liam shrugs. “I found about fifty boxes of PG Tips looting Highgate Hill today, so.” 

Louis hums. “PG Tips? Would’ve thought Twinings. Make Cara feel at home. Posho.” 

“Fuck off, wanker. Your deal.” 

“Yeah, fine. No chance of Yorkshire, then, Li?” 

Liam looks genuinely regretful that he didn’t break into any Yorkshire Tea households on his scavenging mission for lifesaving supplies. “Sorry, babe. I looked. Z and I are going looting again tomorrow, though.” 

“Don’t say looting.” Perrie frowns, tilting her X-Men comic towards the firelight. “Sounds right nasty, don’t it? I like foraging.” 

Harry nods. He likes foraging as well. Makes him think like they’re squirrels, bundling nuts away for winter. “Or scavenging?” 

“We’re not rats, Harold. How about pillaging? Like pirates. Argh, matey.” Louis snarls, teeth white against his beard. “Quite like that, me.” 

“Don’t give a turd what we call it, so long as we get some fuckin’ loo roll,” Niall says, not looking up from his book. “Do me one as well, Leemo.” 

Liam nods and disappears into the kitchen. A moment later a familiar metal clank and slosh of water sound through the walls as Liam sets up their unwieldy camping stove.

Harry goes to sort his cards out when the sharp cry of dogs barking rings through from the street, setting his nerves alight. 

Dogs are never a good sign. 

“Fuck,” Niall curses, tossing his book aside so he can bolt the picture window. 

Gemma hurtles up from her chair, getting the other end of the plywood to help Niall barricade. Harry runs for the door, Zayn killing the candles behind him as Perrie passes Cara mason jars of ash to smother the fire. Louis and Liam sprint for the weapons. In twenty seconds, the room goes black. 

Everyone has a post. Their house isn’t usually a target for gangs or scavengers — they’re a small group, just nine people and a mangy cat who lives with them part time and hasn’t been seen since summer — but a couple blokes with knives once looted their entire stock of food, so they can’t be too careful. 

Harry hooks the chain and peers through the boarded window. A hazy figure rounds the corner at a run: a man, with long loping legs and arms clutching a bundle to his chest. The city is dark and the street winds tightly but Harry can hear that he’s being chased. The dogs sound close. The man runs faster. He’s probably headed for the Heath. The entrance is right beyond their house but there’s open field for ages. He’ll never make it. And he looks like — he looks, almost… 

“Haz — Hazza, what are you doing?” 

Before Harry can second-guess himself — and before Zayn can get an arm around his stomach to stop him — he’s unhooking the chains, unlocking the door and darting out into the street to pull the man into the house. 

The cold air raises goose-pimples all over Harry’s skin, adrenaline and winter chill speeding his limbs. _Don’t fall_ , he commands himself, unhooking the gate and barrelling towards the man to grab his arm. Harry can’t see well in the dark but he hears him cry out; feels him try to wrest from Harry’s grip.

“Trust me,” Harry whispers, and pulls him towards the house. There’s no time for pleasantries. Harry hustles through the gate, the gangly weight of the man trailing behind. In the confusion the man misses his footing on the steps and they both stumble through the doorway, nearly falling, the clamber of dogs and men drawing ever closer outside. 

“Fuck’s sake, Haz!” Zayn jumps aside as they pitch through to the entranceway. Zayn slams the door shut behind them and holds it closed. The climbing roar of dogs and shouting muffles.

The man stares at Harry with big, frightened eyes: clear green-hazel behind thick-rimmed glasses. Harry was right. It’s Nick Grimshaw, off the radio, and the telly. He looks different all dirty, and with a beard, but it’s definitely him. The bundle in his arms yips, and moves. 

“You have a dog?” Harry asks dumbly, although he remembers Grimmy mentioning a dog on his show, Before. Zayn makes a cutting motion across his throat. _Be quiet_. 

Nick Grimshaw nods. The roar comes closer and he twitches, looking at the door like he’s ready to bolt out into harm’s way. 

“Quiet,” Zayn warns, face half-pressed to the window. “They’re nearly here.” 

Harry pitches his voice low. “What’s her name?” Harry knows her name, but he wants to hear Nick say it. Wants to hear Nick say something. He looks frightened. 

The little bundle squirms more, wet nose and bright eyes. Even in the dark entranceway she appears better-groomed than Nick, whose dark hair has grown long and matted and whose skinny jeans are in rags. “Puppy,” Nick coughs, voice hoarse. He darts a hesitant look at Zayn and then rest of the housemates, still manning their posts. Louis has his hand on a gun. Cara’s parents liked to hunt. “Puppy Power Forever, actually.” 

Harry blinks, and then laughs, delighted, like finding treasure in a box of cereal. “That’s the best name I’ve ever heard,” he whispers. “I’m Harry.” 

Nick has a scarred-up face, Puppy Power Forever and a rucksack with, among other things, a battered notebook and a jar of gone off Nutella, which is something none of them have seen for the better part of a year. Puppy is by far the more friendly of the two. Nick sits gingerly on the sofa in the dark and when Liam brings him a cup of tea — his own, half-finished — he stares at it almost without blinking for an entire minute. Puppy runs around the lounge yipping at corners and trying to climb up Harry’s legs. 

“Clear,” Zayn says finally, shoulders settling away from his ears. “They went up through to the Heath, though, so we should keep a low profile in case they come back this way.” 

After the last of the sounds die away they switch on their dimmest torch. Fading yellow light floods the room, sending Nick’s familiar face into stark relief. His cheekbones stick out more than they had in the photos Harry used to see in Heat. 

“Well,” Liam says, beard twitching nervously. Louis is scowling, still clutching the gun. Harry can sense a speech coming on. 

“Well,” agrees Harry, planting himself firmly between Nick and Louis’s fetish for weaponry. 

A tense moment passes before the ceiling creaks, old wood groaning as Fiona comes tramping down the stairs. “Good lord,” she sighs, “I had to wee so badly during that entire thing, but couldn’t find the pot and —” She halts at the foot of the stairs, eyes fixed on Nick. “Grim?” 

All the colour drains from Nick’s face. He’s almost hard to look at. “Fifi?” he asks, raggedy. 

“Do you two know…” Liam trails off, the answer clear. Fiona and Nick have rushed towards one another and are holding on so tight it looks almost painful. They must know each other. 

“Fiona worked for the BBC, before,” Cara says, not sounding particularly surprised by the tearful reunion in the lounge. 

“What?” Harry frowns at her. “I didn’t know that.” 

Cara shrugs. “Not sure what she did exactly. News? Producing? Something clipboard-y, anyway. I didn’t ask.” 

Harry looks back at Fiona and Nick, who are still wrapped up in each other. He feels a little jealous, almost, which is… really weird. He doesn’t actually know Nick Grimshaw. He just… He _feels_ like he does. 

When Nick and Fiona finally pull away they’re both wiping their eyes, laughing a little bit. “I like your beard more than I would’ve thought,” Fiona tells him. “Very wilderness chic.” 

“Your hair is taking over the country, as well,” Nick says, voice so warm it could heat the house. He pokes the frizz with one long finger. “Nature is doing amazing things.” 

“Oh, shut it, you idiot,” Fiona tells him, and it sounds like an endearment. 

Everyone backs off to give them a little privacy. It’s only manners, even if manners don’t hold much point anymore. Louis retreats into the kitchen, face dark, and Harry follows. 

“Another mouth to feed,” he scowls. “Really, Haz. And now he’s Fiona’s mate, so we’ll never be rid of him.”

Harry catches Louis’s arm. “I couldn’t let him — they were after him, Lou. Whoever those people were.” 

Louis shakes his head. “Everyone’s got people after them, Harry. Where’s he even going to sleep? There aren’t any free beds.” 

Harry looks through the open door towards where Nick is sat on the sofa next to Fiona. His eyes track Puppy around the room. He’s got really long legs and arms, like a spider, but he keeps himself all tucked up. They’re holding hands. “We could swap things around. There’s some empty space. Maybe Niall could kip back in with me and we could put Nick on the sofa. Or in Fiona’s room, if Gem doesn’t mind sleeping downstairs. Or he could take my bed and I could sleep on the second floor landing with Cara. We could get another camp bed.” 

“It’s still more trouble. We’re already full to bursting in this house.” Louis’s got his chin set in the way he does, like his jaw is a barricade.

“We’ll make room,” Harry insists in a low whisper, so that Nick can’t overhear. Louis still doesn’t look convinced. Harry doesn’t understand that at all. A year as long as a lifetime has passed since Harry and Gemma took Niall in, somewhere in Camberwell before the floods. Give or take eleven months since Belgravia, where Cara and Fiona found them. Harry doesn’t know how much time has passed since Zayn and Perrie found Louis, or since they took in Liam but he knows three seasons have passed— four, nearly — since they all found each other. They found each other; now they have Nick. That’s how they survive. That’s how they live now. 

He doesn’t know how to explain that to Louis. 

“We don’t know he can be trusted. Some ex-celebrity. What use is that?” 

Harry chews on his lip, feeling mutinous and mute, his slow voice never much of a match for Louis’s rapid tongue. _Use_. “Fiona trusts him. And he’s — I used to listen to his show, like. Before. He’s a nice person.” 

Louis just shakes his head. “We were all nice people before,” he says flatly, and then goes out into the back garden, the door thumping behind him. Harry doesn’t follow. Louis will come around. He’ll have to. 

“Tommo not pleased?” Liam leans in the doorway between the morning room and the hallway, but he’s not looking at Harry. Liam stares past Harry towards the door, where Louis’s faint outline is visible through the glass. 

Harry shakes his head. “Says it’s too much bother.” 

Liam shrugs. “Fiona obviously trusts him, and we need Fiona. Don’t see a way around it. I’ll talk Lou round, don’t worry.” 

“That’s not what — okay.” Harry sighs, looking out the grimy window. “Thanks, Li.” 

Liam nods and takes the door. The low murmuring of voices seeps through the wall and Harry ducks back into the hallway to give them some space. Never much privacy to be had, here, but it’s nice to pretend. 

In the hallway, another refugee in the name of privacy sits on the second to last step of the staircase, chin in hand. “I think it’s a good thing, Haz,” Perrie says, and nods towards the door to the lounge. “Fiona — never seen her so happy. You know?” She smiles. “We can make room.” 

“Might have to move into a bigger house, at this rate.” Harry nudges Perrie until there’s space for him on the next step. “If there are more people, I mean.” 

Perrie exhales an almost laugh which Harry generously interprets as agreement. 

“Be sad to leave this place, though.” Harry rests his hand on the post, looking down the hall to the kitchen. Whoever lived here Before had good taste. Layers of picture frames and posters obscure the whitewashed walls: old yellowing prints of Victorian families and spiderweb maps of London. The maps have been particularly useful, with Google out of commission. “Been nearly a year, hasn’t it?” 

“Bit less.” Perrie blows fringe out of her eyes and opens her mouth to say something else, only Gemma is coming downstairs above them, shining torchlight over the dim entrance room. 

“Any development?” she asks, stepping over them and shutting off the torch. She slides down the wall to sit cross-legged at the foot of the stairs and starts braiding her hair out of her face. Gemma’s hair has gone as wild as the local flora. Before everything she had been bleaching it pale blue and purple and now there’s six inches of brown at the top, the whole rainbow reaching her waist. She winds the multicoloured braid over her head like a crown. 

“Louis isn’t happy,” Perrie says, sotto vocce like Nick and Fiona could hear them from the lounge if she isn’t careful. Judging by the watery murmurs coming through the cracked door, this seems unlikely. 

“We’ll have to do a vote, probably,” Gemma muses, propping the torch under her chin. “Don’t make that face, Harry. There’s no chance we’d be turning him out now, obviously, but those are the rules.” 

Harry kicks out so that his wool-covered toe jabs Gemma’s calf. “Good, ‘cos we’re not turning him out.” 

Perrie looks between Gemma and Harry. “Did you know him too, Before? Nick Grimshaw?” 

Gemma smirks. “Harry wishes.” 

Harry thunks his head into his arms and groans, low, the universal protest of the little brother. “Oh my _god_ , Gem. Shut up.” 

“ _Oh_ ,” Perrie says wickedly, and Harry isn’t looking but he knows she’s grinning with all her teeth. “It’s like _that_ , then.” 

“It’s like that,” Gemma agrees. “Haz used to fancy the trousers off Nick Grimshaw. Made me listen to his show every single day — wasn’t too much of a hardship, really, I liked his show a lot, but.” Gemma pokes Harry in the neck. “This one. Bloody obsessed. What are the chances, eh? His teenage crush shows up on our street in the middle of the apocalypse.”

“The apocalypse is over,” Harry mumbles into his arms, where he will be living for the foreseeable future because utter humiliation is heating his face and ears and also probably his entire body. “It’s the post-apocalypse.” 

“Whatever. Still amazing.” 

“You’re not having any of my condoms,” Perrie warns. “We need those, you trollop.” 

“Your _face_ needs those,” grumps Harry, ears burning. 

“Cheer up, love,” Gemma tells him. “Maybe at the meeting we can wrangle it so Grimmy’s in your bed tonight.” 

“Really?” Harry pokes his head up from his arms. 

Gemma and Perrie shriek with laughter. “Oh my _god_ ,” Perrie gasps, “Oh my god. He’s probably traumatised all to hell, you little pervert.” 

Harry frowns. “I wouldn’t — Perrie, I wouldn’t, like. Not _now_. That’s not — that’s not on.” 

Perrie pats his shoulder. “I know you wouldn’t, love. But if you’ve an eye for him… well. Maybe someday. Worked for Tommo and Liam, didn’t it?” 

“Could still probably swing it,” Gemma says, wiping laughter tears from her eyes. “I remember the show — you’re _so_ his type.” 

“Really?” 

Gemma hits the side of Harry’s head, which is not as painful as it could have been considering how long his hair has grown. “You’re disgusting. But yes, and don’t pretend like you don’t _obviously know that_.” 

The door creaks and Harry’s entire body rushes with nerves, but it’s just Fiona. “Grim’s knackered,” she tells them, her face soft and blotchy red from crying. Harry feels very, very guilty for discussing what he had been discussing. “We should put him up for the night, before the house meeting.” 

“He could sleep in Harry’s bed,” Perrie suggests slyly, digging her toes into Harry’s hip. 

Gemma nods enthusiastically. “It’s nice and soft, and there’s plenty of room.” 

Fiona looks between them, and the expression dawning on her face is about a third exasperation, a third affection and a third hysterical laughter. “Really? You three…” She shakes her head, hair flying around. “I was going to see if we could swap it around so Nick and I were in the same room, but…” 

“Oh — if that’s, like. If that’s better,” Harry rushes to interject, slightly horror-struck that his stupid crush is getting so much leverage over actual, like. Possible trauma, or whatever. 

“Nick snores,” Fiona warns. “Loud. Like you do, Harry, like a bloody foghorn. And if I don’t get enough sleep, I get —” 

“We know,” chorus Gemma and Perrie, who as much as anyone have experienced Fiona in a narky mood. 

“I love Nick to bits and I’d be happy to stay with him a couple nights — he really, really hates sleeping alone, and I can’t imagine now; we can’t put him in the lounge — but if there’s no funny business, and you don’t mind…” Fiona stares Harry down, her light eyes serious. “I can ask him if he’s all right with it.” 

Harry’s stomach does a guilty little excited jump. “Yeah, okay. If he doesn’t mind.” 

Fiona nods and disappears back into the lounge. Perrie and Gemma hit him over the shoulders in muted joy. 

 

 

“It’s not much,” Harry warns as he leads Nick upstairs. That’s not false modesty: Harry sleeps in the smallest bedroom, only just wide enough to fit a double bed. He likes it though. The walls are a bright, sunny yellow and there’s a window onto the back garden and a little fireplace that used to be closed up, before they figured out how to clear it. Harry pauses in the doorway, torchlight flickering over the walls and floral duvet. “We stayed at Cara’s parents’ place in Belgravia for a few weeks, and we all had our own rooms there but…” 

“Too close in,” Nick finishes for him, stepping past Harry into the little space. 

Harry nods. “Whole street’s mostly underwater now.” Nick looks a bit nervous, a strange contrast to the excited way Puppy is licking his bearded face. “I could sleep out in the landing,” Harry says, lingering in the doorway. “Or maybe the floor in Gemma and Fi’s room, if you’d rather. Fiona said — but if you want. Whatever you want to do is fine.” 

Nick sets Puppy down on the bed, and she immediately runs over the bed, sniffing every crease and corner. Their sometimes cat used to kip in with Harry. Puppy can definitely smell the residue. “That’s okay,” Nick says, “It’s a big bed, innit. And you did get me off the streets, didn’t you?” 

Harry shrugs, and politely tries not to stare as Nick strips his filthy jeans off and divests himself of his leather jacket and jumper. He’s got a threadbare t-shirt on underneath, and black pants, and when he crawls up over the bed to lie down Harry can’t help but notice his long, long legs and the curve of his bum. He swallows hard. 

“I’m going to go downstairs for a bit,” Harry says, biting the skin at the edge of his thumb. 

Nick nods and slides his glasses off, putting them carefully on the windowsill. He looks more familiar without them — more like the Nick Grimshaw from the magazines — but there’s still a wide, awful gap from the clean and pressed man who smiled delightedly up from newspapers and this drawn, skinny person, dirty cheeks and sad eyes, who looks already half-asleep as he draws the heavy layer of duvets up to his chin. 

“I’ll be back later,” Harry promises.  

Nick nods again, arms twining around a pillow. One hand reaches out to drape protectively over Puppy’s back as she settles into a ball beside him. “Okay,” Nick says, hoarse, eyes already shut. 

Nick’s northern accent pings Harry’s memory, lights his brain up like on an MRI machine. Harry blinks over the bed at Nick’s face, lit and shadowed in the moon. It’s dumb, but Harry feels like he knows him already. Properly, not as a celebrity, or anything. That’s been pretty common after everything happened, as if their shrunken population has restarted some species bond, but it’s even keener now. 

Harry leaves the room quietly, sock feet shuffling over the creaky floor. He leaves the door cracked just in case Nick doesn’t like to feel trapped. Cara’s like that; hates it when a door is closed. She bathes with the door wide open and shouts at them when they pass by, laughing into the pond water. 

Sooner or later, they’re going to run out of batteries and then torches will no longer be helpful, so Harry does his best to navigate his way back to the ground floor by touch and moonlight. 

The fire’s back up in the lounge. Flickering yellow guides him back to the room where all his housemates are sat, waiting. It feels a bit weird, especially with the exhausted man asleep in his bed upstairs. Harry reminds himself that they won’t vote Nick out, no matter what. Fiona wouldn’t let that happen. They’ll work something out. 

“He settled all right?” Fiona asks, brusk tone at odds with how soft her eyes have gone. Harry suppresses the desire to hug her. 

“Yeah, already asleep, I think.” Harry plops down at her feet next to the armchair and gives in to his impulse to rest his head in her lap. She snorts and pats his head, as usual. If Harry had wanted proper petting he’d be better off with Zayn or Niall, but Fiona’s solidity helps in its own way. And besides, she’s on his side. Their side. He doesn’t know when he decided there were sides, but he has. Nick’s not going anywhere. 

“Let’s do this meeting quickly, I’m knackered,” Gemma says, yawning, and Cara nods, half-draped over Gemma’s shoulder in front of the blue sofa. Above them, Louis tenses, back stick straight. Liam puts a hand on his knee.

On the beige sofa, Zayn and Perrie are entwined so closely they might as well be sharing an armchair instead, which is helpful as Niall sprawls over two seats and his feet edge towards Zayn’s thigh on the third. 

“Want to start us off, Fi?” Niall asks, and Fiona nods.  

“I’m not going to do a sob story,” she informs them. “Nick — we worked together, before. We were friends. He’s a really sweet person and he’ll work hard. He’s clumsy — wouldn’t trust him with most tools, to be honest — but he’ll help as much as he can. He’s clever, cleverer than people think he is, and…” Fiona’s hand tightens in Harry’s hair. “He’s got a good heart. We can trust him. Okay?”

“I’m okay with it,” Harry says immediately, and Gemma rolls her eyes. 

“We know,” she says. “Me too, though.” 

“It’s another mouth to feed,” Zayn murmurs, face twisting. Zayn hates having to be practical, when he’d rather help. 

“The waste output’s still a problem,” says Niall, mouth pulled to the side. Cara nods.

“And it’s winter. Only going to get colder,” adds Liam. Harry shoots him the most betrayed look he can muster. Liam raises his hands, palms out. “I’m not — I don’t disagree, I just. Someone should say. It’s harder to forage in winter, and those blokes wiped out most of our stock last month.” 

“Another pair of hands could help, though,” Perrie says. “Even if he’s clumsy. Haz is clumsy too, and he manages. Plus he’s tall. Couldn’t hurt.” 

“Tall also means he eats more,” Cara points out, and Gemma scowls down at her, which Harry appreciates. Cara raises an eyebrow. “What? He _does_. Taller people need more calories. Science.” 

Harry lifts his head from Fiona’s knee. “That’s not — we have to think about what’s really important.” Harry thinks about how Nick had gripped Harry’s forearm with white knuckles when he stumbled on the front steps, and tries to find the right words. “It’s not just hands, and tools, and space, you know? It’s _people_. We shouldn’t turn people away. We shouldn’t — we want to rebuild life, don’t we? We need people for that. Good people.” 

Louis and Liam exchange looks, heads cocked to the side like they’re reading each others’ minds. Zayn’s already soft-eyed, and Harry knows immediately that he’s won him over. 

“Let’s do a vote,” Fiona says. “All for?” 

Harry’s hand shoots up, followed shortly by Gemma and Perrie, then Zayn. Cara sighs and adds her bony finger to the mix. Liam, after another glance at Louis, raises his arm. Louis looks mutinous, but he’s also voting in favour, so Harry counts his glower as a win. 

“I guess we can manage,” Niall says, and makes it unanimous. 

“Good.” Fiona seems like she’s trying pretty hard not to sound relieved, but she does anyway. “Now, we’ll just need to make some edits to the work schedule.” 

The meeting adjoins shortly after that and Gemma pokes Harry’s back the entire way up the stairs and towards his bedroom. 

“ _Stop_ it,” Harry whines, ducking out of the way. 

“Ugh, fine,” Gemma sighs dramatically, taking the next flight of stairs up to her room. “Have fuuuun.” 

“Insensitive,” Harry grumbles, and goes to the bathroom to clean his teeth. 

Fiona’s waiting for him outside the door when he finishes, and for a brief, selfish moment he’s anticipating her asking to swap beds. “Just needed the toothpaste,” she says, slipping past him. “Oh — Haz.” 

Harry stops in the corridor. 

“Don’t leave him alone in the morning,” Fiona says, round face unreadable in the dark. “If you have to get up, wake him as well. Okay?” 

“Yeah, okay,” Harry says, and slips through the half-opened door to his room. 

As Fiona promised, Nick snores spectacularly, in wheezy choked huffs through his mouth. It’s kind of cute, actually. He’s like his dog. Harry readies himself for bed as quickly as possible and eases himself up over the covers so as not to move the mattress too much before settling down. 

The nights have been getting colder lately, but under the puff of multiple duvets and next to the warm bundles of Nick and Puppy, Harry feels nice and toasty. There’s a pleasant curl of anticipation in his belly. _New people_. Well, new person and new dog. 

It’s been _ages_ since Harry’s seen anybody besides his housemates, or looters, or gangers with knives. Harry knows it’s unfair to pin so many hopes to Nick Grimshaw, who probably just wants to sleep for a while and maybe eat something, but it’s hard to shake that helium bubble of possibility. A new person feels like a new universe, entire cities opening up to Harry’s starved eyes. 

Still, he does his best to stay to his side of the bed as he falls asleep, keeping his hands tucked under his own pillow. 

 

 

In the morning, Harry wakes to see Nick with his knees tucked up under his chin, peering down at a book and periodically pushing his glasses back up his nose. A notebook lies next to him, pen marking his place. 

“What’re you reading?” Harry asks, voice all hoarse with sleep, and Nick flinches. 

“Um.” He turns the book over and examines the front. “The Secret Lives of Sharks. Apparently, tiger sharks can have up to forty babies at a time, did you know?” 

Harry shakes his head, considering. “That’s a lot of nappies.” 

“They’d want to hire an octopus for a nanny,” Nick says thoughtfully. “For the extra arms.” 

“Not for when they’re older, though. Everyone knows octopuses are suckers.” He shoots Nick a grin, dimpling up helplessly. He hopes octupuses is the right plural. Octopi sounds like a novelty food product. 

Nick snorts. “That’s awful,” he says, but he says _that’s awful_ like it’s really not awful at all, and Harry beams wider. “What’s your surname, by the way?” 

“Styles.” Harry rubs his eyes, pushing hair out of his forehead. He’d like to have a bath this week, maybe. He’s feeling a little acne-ridden, which is unfortunate considering how he’d like to look fit right about now. 

“Harry Styles,” Nick says, and something in Harry thrills a little. It’s strange to hear his full name out loud like that. Harry Styles. He’s Harry Styles. 

“Nick Grimshaw,” Harry tries, wondering if Nick gets that thrill too. “Nicholas. Nicholas Grimshaw.”  

“Know my full name, then, stalker?” 

Harry hides part of his face in his shoulder. “Yeah,” he admits. “Off telly and radio, and all. Well, nearly. Don’t know your middle name.” 

Something in Nick’s face shifts and he looks down, his glasses sliding down his nose so he has to push them right back up. “Middle name’s Peter.” 

“Mine’s Edward.” 

“Like the king. Edward the Confessor, innit?” Harry must look surprised because Nick laughs. “I think that’s the one. I had a lot of time for reading, this past year.” 

“That why those people were after you, last night? Nefarious reading?” 

Nick bites his lip, thumb tracing the edge of the page. “They have a monopoly on everything in their territory. I had to — Puppy’s not always good, like. With catching rats or owt. She needs food.” 

“There’s still stock, further out,” Harry says, looking at where Puppy’s curled up on Nick’s legs. “The shops out here weren’t touched much. Basics are all taken, but I think there’s still pet food. I could show you.” 

Nick is quiet for a moment. “Okay,” he says finally. “Where even _are_ we, anyhow? It was so dark last night; I’ve got no idea where I ended up going.” 

“Hampstead. Right off the Heath. Here, look.” Harry shuffles across the bed to the window, motioning for Nick to join him. The back garden spreads below them, and beyond that the bare branches of winter trees and the glistening dew green of field. “We picked it cos of the location. It’s close to water and firewood, too small to be noticeable by the bigger gangs and terraced houses keep the heat in better.” 

“Clever,” Nick says, peering out past the glass. 

“It’s the others. I’d never have thought of that stuff on my own,” Harry admits. “Fiona, mostly.” 

If it hadn’t been for Gemma, Harry’d probably still be in his south London flat, trying to survive off packets of peanuts and rainwater, possibly a few metres underwater if the Thames stretched that way. He’s had ideas since and some good, but nothing as important as the one Fiona had when they started to deplete Cara’s parents’ supplies: water. Bedrooms are all well and good, but if they want to survive they’d need a reliable supply of water. 

Harry’s made himself get better at ideas since Belgravia. 

“She’s a clever clogs, that one,” Nick says fondly, leaning his forehead against the glass. “She’ll be downstairs, yeah?” 

“Yeah. She gets up early.” 

“Still gets up early.” Nick smiles like the sun after a storm. “Good old Fifi.” 

They sit there for a moment, watching the light glisten off the dewy green, and then Nick clears his throat. “Most people — I’ve run into other groups before. They don’t take people in. Not for free. Not like you did, from the street.” Nick looks at Harry, forehead tense. “Why did you?” 

Harry pulls Puppy into his lap and then tugs on her ears, stalling for time. He’s not sure himself. It was instinct. He sort of thought he recognised Nick, whom he’d always liked and maybe fancied a bit, but even if he hadn’t known who he was… People shouldn’t be left to run. “We _should_ take people in,” he says. “When they — when they need it, like. Just because other groups don’t, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. We all need each other now.” 

Nick blinks at him, rough beard and big eyes behind smudged glasses. Strange — Nick Grimshaw, whose face Harry used to know as well as anybody’s, and he’s like looking through a fractal mirror. Bits and pieces add up but the whole is so different, up close. 

“You make zero sense,” Nick informs him. 

Harry shrugs. “Nothing much makes sense these days.” Puppy licks his hand, as if to agree with him. 

“True enough,” Nick says, almost laughing, and leans his forehead against the glass of the window again, staring over the bare trees. 

“You should eat something.” Harry looks at the knobs of Nick’s knees and the way his elbows stick out. Everyone’s a bit thinner than they naturally would be, really, but Nick doesn’t look like he’s been as good as they have been when it comes to finding food. 

“You don’t — I mean, I can manage. I don’t want to, like. Take from you.” Nick shrinks back a bit, and he looks at Puppy in Harry’s lap like he’d like to grab her and use her as a shield, maybe. 

“Don’t be ridiculous. Fiona’d never forgive us if we didn’t feed you.” Harry hands the wiggling dog back to her owner and struggles out of bed, tugging on a thick jumper. He hands a grey one to Nick, who stares down at it for a moment before setting Puppy aside to tug the knit over his head. 

“Clean,” he says, smiling so wide something in Harry’s chest caves in. “It’s been _so_ long since I’ve worn something clean.”

“Ish,” Harry allows, proud anyway. “We try to do a wash day every fortnight but it’s not always the best.” 

Nick’s grin fades as he looks down at where his wrist pokes out of the rumpled sleeve. “Shit, I’m going to get it all dirty. I’ve gone and ruined it already, probably.” 

“You haven’t,” Harry says staunchly. “We’re due for a wash day soon, anyway. Don’t worry about it. D’you want some socks?” 

It’s entirely possibly that Harry will never see a face as hopeful as Nick’s is when he hears the word ‘socks’. 

“We should bin these shoes,” Harry says, bending down to examine the muddy trainers Nick discarded past the foot of the bed. They’re worn nearly through the sole and have acquired the kind of soggy damp that buried into Harry’s clothes and shoes and skin months ago in Belgravia, that bone chill seep that never drains away.  

“I’ve got big feet,” Nick says hesitantly, wrapping his hands around one bare heel. “Not sure if… I don’t have any other ones anymore.” 

“That’s okay, I have big feet too. We can find more. Niall has a stash of shoes from all over growing somewhere downstairs.” 

Nick bites his lip. “Yeah, all right then. See if he can find me a nice heel, will you? Love a stiletto, me.” 

“No one expects a scavenger in Louboutins.” Harry grins and digs through his tiny wardrobe for the thickest socks he can manage. 

“My feet are disgusting,” Nick warns. “I _hate_ feet. Blisters are the absolute _least_ of my foot problems.” 

“We’ll have Zayn take a look later, maybe. He was a medical student; he might have some ideas. Here.” Harry passes Nick a fat roll of grey wool. “It’s no trouble. Socks are pretty easy to make and the floor is cold downstairs. You’ll want these.” 

Nick winces as he eases the socks over his sore toes but when they’re all covered he looks like a small child at Christmas, all eager delight. “Look at that. Mittens of the feet.” He clicks his heels together like Dorothy. 

Harry snorts, clapping a hand to his mouth. 

“Don’t laugh at me, Harold. I’m a linguistic virtuoso. Like Shakespeare.” Nick smiles at him and Harry feels so, so warm, because that teasing tone made it sound like — like they’re already friends. Like how mates rib each other. 

Harry Styles, mates with Nick Grimshaw, at the end of the world. 

“C’mon, let’s get you fed,” Harry says, still feeling warm and happy, and leads him through the rest of the house. 

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Nick says, holding Puppy to his chest as they take the stairs. “What are these, fairy lights? Kinda?” 

“At some point, probably. Not our place, though. Well, has been for a few months. Not sure who lived here Before.” 

Nick stops halfway down the steps to peer into a framed photograph. “These people, I think.” 

Harry doubles back to look as well. Nick’s chosen target is a picture Harry had spent a long time staring at when they first moved in: two women and a big golden retriever, arms all around each other and hair whipping round smiling faces. They’re on a beach somewhere, both in waterproof jackets and big boots. 

“I think they were happy here,” Nick says softly. 

Harry nods. That’s just what he thought, too. He thinks that’s why the house has been nice to them. It’s a sort of stupid idea, he knows, but… Maybe, if you believe in ghosts. Maybe that’s why. 

Everyone is waiting for them in the kitchen. Nick freezes in the doorway and Harry has to push past, but even he falters when he sees what meets them. It must be strange to see everyone as Nick does, staring right at him without the coat of comfortable familiarity: Cara, red beanie pulled over her thick brows; Fiona, with her mass of hair only getting frizzier; Niall sorting out the camping stove with his hoodie up over his head; Perrie eating stale granola from a plastic bag with a spoon; Gemma with her multicoloured braid crown; Louis glowering through his thicket of facial hair. Zayn and Liam are absent. They were going to check out a warehouse up north and probably left at dawn. 

“Hiya,” Nick says, waving. He sets Puppy down and she skitters on the wood, exploring the corners and the bin. “I — thanks for putting me up, last night.” 

“Of course, love,” says Fiona, getting up to kiss Nick on the cheek. “Let’s get you some brekkie. Looking a bit peaky, you are.” 

Nick’s eyes rake over the table. They don’t have much: just peanut butter and oats with powdered milk, sterilised water. He’s holding himself very tightly with that same shocked expression he had the night before, when Liam brought him a cup of tea and he stared at it like he had almost forgotten how to drink it. 

“Want some cornflakes?” 

Nick blinks at Gemma and then looks back at Harry, almost like he’s trying to find the light at the base of the stairs. 

“Just kidding, all the cereal’s gone off. We’ve got oats, though.” Gemma nods back to where Niall is stirring a pot over the little portable stove. “And honey. Honey lasts forever, did you know?” 

“Think I read that in National Geographic,” Nick says. “Like, there was some in a tomb in Ancient Egypt, still sealed and all, and the honey was still edible. Dunno why they wanted to sample ye olden fossils, but there you go.” 

Perrie laughs. “Wicked.” 

Harry beams, sliding in next to Gemma. “Well, the quality could’ve been… _Phar_ -aoh to pyra- _middling_.” 

“No,” Niall says flatly. Harry sticks his tongue out at him. 

Nick is still standing, looking between Fiona and the empty seat next to Harry with a misplaced expression Harry wants to erase out of existence for the rest of ever. 

“Go on, sit down,” Cara tells him, and then throws a spoon at his head. Nick attempts to catch it but fumbles until the metal clangs to the floor. Even Louis laughs at Nick’s guilty expression. 

“C’mon.” Harry pats the chair next to him and Nick takes it uneasily, balancing on the wood like it might collapse. Fiona reaches over to take Nick’s hand. 

Fiona isn’t a big toucher. Whenever Harry tries to get a nice cuddle off her she tends to pat his head with bemused tolerance and wait a patient thirty seconds before ducking from his grip, unless she’s feeling particularly emotional and then she’ll wait a full minute. 

“When’ll Liam and Zayn be back?” Harry asks, just to break the silence. Niall’s started to spoon oats into bowls and it won’t be long until they’re eating, but Nick still seems tense and the silence feels _weird_. Normally they’re all pretty chatty. 

“Dunno,” Louis says gruffly. He wraps his fingers around his mug and glares down at it. Louis is never happy when Liam goes out without him. Zayn’s good in a crisis but Harry gets it, that Louis wants to see with his own two eyes. It’s strange when people go out now. They’re untethered. No mobile, no telephone line, no email, nothing. The world feels so much bigger now. Hampstead might as well be its own country. “Said they were going to try three-ish places. They’re on bicycles, so. Shouldn’t be more than a few hours, hopefully.” 

“Think one of the places was pretty far out, so I’d guess around dinner,” Niall says, passing bowls from the island to Fiona, who starts their shuffle down the table. “Annoyin’. Zayn was on dinner duty.” 

“I’ll take it,” Harry volunteers immediately. 

Across the table, Cara dumps so much cinnamon into her bowl that brown powder billows out above like a dust storm. 

“Not so much,” Perrie chides. “We’ll have to find a whole gallon, at the rate you use it.” Cara makes a face but puts the shaker back in the centre of the table. 

“Dinner duty?” Nick asks, after a minute. Nick may be trying not to track the porridge with his eyes but he’s definitely failing. 

“We’ve all got jobs here,” Louis explains, tossing Nick the honey. Nick grapples for the bottle until it topples to the table with a clamour. “We have a schedule on the chalkboard.” He nods to the black wall behind Harry and Nick, where the chart is mapped out. 

“We’ll put you in today,” Gemma says. “Give you a few hours to settle in and then work you like a horse.” 

Nick tries a smile. “Excellent. Always fancied a good carriage.” 

Harry attempts very, very hard not to make any riding jokes. Cara kicks him under the table, though, so he’s pretty sure his face is telling the jokes for him. 

“Oh — I was meaning to ask. Nialler, d’you think Nick could get some shoes after breakfast? His are ruined.” 

Niall nods. “Sure. I’ll look through the stash in a sec.” 

“No rush,” Nick says, through a mouthful of the oatmeal he’s shovelling into his mouth at reckless speed, face rapturous. In the light of day the darkness under his eyes is more obvious, blue-veined and nervous. “Why d’you collect shoes, by the way? Fashion-minded?” 

“Weren’t you, like, some sort of fashion ambassador?” asks Perrie, and Harry frowns, because it’s sort of… rude, isn’t it, to ask about Before. If you don’t know somebody, especially. 

Nick doesn’t seem to mind though, just laughs and nods, scraping the bottom of his bowl. “Suppose I was,” he says, mouth quirking wryly. “Those trainers I was wearing had a write-up in GQ. Lot of good that does, huh?” 

“Guess not. Shoes are a finite resource.” Niall scrapes the bottom of his bowl, frowning into the porcelain. “We can figure out how to make some clothes and shit, but shoes… We need to have enough for a while. Foraging is rough as hell on the feet, yeah? Loads of flooding.” He gets up from his seat, taking his and Nick and Fiona’s empty bowls as he goes. 

Perrie pushes her bowl to Nick.  A puddle of oats cling to the bottom, glistening with honey. “Here, you look like you haven’t eaten in a week.” 

“Thank you,” Harry mouths as Nick tucks in to Perrie’s leftovers. Fiona’s eyes look a little watery. 

“What size are you, Grimmy?” calls Niall from the shoe cupboard. “Ten? Eleven?” 

“Eleven,” Nick says, and Niall returns with a pair of boots. 

“There, not bad. We pick up the massive ones for Haz, and you’re just a size up from him.” 

Nick looks at the shoes and at the porridge and at Fiona, and then he looks down. Puppy mills around under the table, bumping up against each of their shins in turn. Harry suspects Nick’s eyes are watering, and pats his back. Nick swallows, fingers tight over his knees. “Thanks,” Nick says, and his voice drags hoarse through the vowel. 

“No trouble,” Niall says briskly, even though it’s kind of a little trouble, and he and Cara clear the rest of the table. 

 

 

In the afternoon Nick asks Harry how they stay so clean. “I mean, comparatively,” he amends, with a tilt of his pink mouth. “That hair’s a bit in want of shampoo, Styles.” 

Harry helps Nick lug buckets of water up the stairs from the paddling pool in the back garden to fill the bath a little way. It’ll be cold, but water is water. Harry sets out shampoo and soap and some relatively clean clothes, and, after a moment of deliberation, a razor in case Nick would like a shave. Harry doesn’t have enough hair to shave off, really, but Liam sometimes likes to have a shave if he’s having a bath. Says it makes him feel like a person, a bit. Fair enough. Liam’s beard is quite bear-like. 

Through the door Harry can hear sloshing around and some silly off-key singing, a Drake song he remembers like something from his childhood. He sinks to the floor outside the doorway, hugging his knees and listening to Nick hum to Puppy. Gemma passes on her way up the stairs and raises an eyebrow. Harry flips two fingers at her and she laughs, flipping right back. 

“Oh, Harold?” Nick calls, voice carrying easily through the door. 

Harry tenses. “Uh-huh?” 

“Just wondering, you lot all have reasonably cut hair. Do you have a hair stylist in residence, or summat?” 

“Can I come in?” 

There’s a sloshing, some fumbling and an “Ow!”that sets Harry to giggling. “Yeah, go on then.” 

Harry eases the door open. Nick is sat on the edge of the bathtub wearing a spare pair of Harry’s black pants and shaking his hair out in the towel. He’s shaved, the line of his chin dotted with red where he’s cut himself. Without the beard his eyes look even bigger, clearer. Harry’s heart weakly attempts to evacuate his chest cavity. It’s obvious Nick’s a bit too thin, the rungs of his ribs bunging out in a way that makes Harry want to bake him seventeen varieties of pie and then sit and watch as he tries every one and ranks them in order of how happy they make him feel, but his legs are so long and the hair is thick over his chest and, just… _God_. Harry hasn’t been attracted to anyone in months, like this. Maybe a year. He’d forgotten that bodies could make him feel so much. Bodies used to be some of Harry’s favourite things, Before. Harry’s throat feels very dry. 

“Used to do a towel turban all the time, as a child,” Nick says, winding the towel up over his head. “Thought it was the thing to do.” 

“Me too,” Harry says. He smiles, and then feels a bit sad. He did that because his mum and Gemma did. He wonders what happened to Nick’s sister, or his mum. 

“Now my hair is so luxurious, it deserves the cloth encasement.” Nick cocks his chin to the side, framing his face with his hands. 

“Because you’re worth it,” coos Harry, tossing his head. Nick snorts, and then unwinds the turban to gather around his shoulders. He’s shaking a little. The bathroom isn’t too cold when Harry’s got his fireplace going on the other side of the wall, but winter still leaks through the windows, chilly and damp. Puppy curls tight on the little rug by the sink, snoring and twitching in her canine dreams. 

“You got scissors, then?” 

Harry nods and runs to the kitchen to fetch them.  

When Harry was fourteen he used to watch Nick on telly and his belly would burn, lying half hard on the lounge sofa thinking about Nick Grimshaw touching him. Now he’s standing in the bathroom of a house that belongs to strangers, cutting Nick’s hair. He’s both exactly and nothing like Harry would have expected. 

Last June Harry cut two inches from Niall’s overgrown thicket of a blond mop, hysterically laughing at the nineties frost effect left by the remains of his bleach job. They’d done it in in the back garden as Cara climbed the chestnut tree as far as she could go, reporting back on where the fires were smoking over the skyline. It had felt intimate, but nothing like this. 

Harry has Nick’s skull tilted forward and he’s methodically hacking away at the long pieces, letting them litter the white tile in damp peaks and valleys. Hesitantly, he puts a hand to the nape of Nick’s neck, brushing up the knobs of his spine to where the hair should cut off. Harry can see the shiver run through Nick’s skin. It passes into his, reflexive. 

Harry goes around to the side of his head, easing Nick’s glasses off his nose. He sets them on the sink. They’re heavy. Nick must have pretty bad eyesight. 

Nick’s eyes are shut. He clears his throat. “So how many people live here in total, young Styles?”

Harry traces the edge of Nick’s ear, cutting the pieces there. He’s kind of trying to go for a short on the sides, long on the top thing, like Nick had Before. Really, it would be better for Nick’s aesthetic life to have Gemma do the cut, but Harry’s going to pretend that Gemma’s too busy because he doesn’t want to lose this quiet stillness with Nick’s elegant neck and the wet strands of his hair. He smells like the same soap and shampoo they all use, a little like sweat still and like man. 

“Uh,” Harry starts, and then tries again. “Nine. Ten, with you as well. Liam and Zayn went out on a supply run this morning; they’ll be back later tonight.” 

“Saw them last night, then. Which one is tea biceps and which one is heartbreakingly beautiful?” 

Harry pokes the back of Nick’s neck hard and Nick laughs, a hoarse, happy sound. “Zayn’s the pretty one. Liam’s the one with the tea and the muscles. Which one am I?” Harry has muscles too. Would it be too obvious if he took his shirt off to prove that point? 

“Well, there’s Fifi, and tall Cara, and scowly Louis, with the beard. Then there’s — Gemma’s your sister, isn’t she? You look alike.” 

“Yeah, she is,” says Harry, circling round so he’s facing Nick, holding his forehead steady as he clips at his sideburns. 

“That’s lucky,” Nick says mildly, and Harry puts a hand to his shoulder. He doesn’t quite know what to say — he _is_ lucky. He and Gemma lived together, Before, and they both survived the virus. Niall had a brother who was back in Ireland, when it happened. Cara’s sisters didn’t make it. Harry’s lucky. Harry’s very, very lucky. 

“Did your…” Harry stops himself, frowning at Nick’s right ear. “Sorry, that’s… I know, it’s a little personal.” 

“I had a brother and a sister,” Nick says, eyes trained on the window. Outside, a cluster of sparrows swoop to populate the branches of the overgrown tree. “And a niece. She might… She might still be alive. I don’t know.” 

“I’m sorry,” Harry says. He never knows what to say, except for sorry. He _is_ sorry. He hands out apologies like wafers at mass, hopeful, empty absolution and a tiny caloric spike. 

“Me too,” Nick says, eyes unmoving. “Now make me look dashing, Harry Styles.” 

“You’re already dashing,” Harry says, before he can stop himself, and then ducks his face, ears burning. 

“Shut up,” Nick groans fondly, kicking out at Harry’s legs. “You recall that there is actually a mirror in here, don’t you?” 

Harry smiles, shaking his head. With one finger he traces the silvery line of the scar across Nick’s forehead, ghosting over the skin and then delving to part Nick’s eyebrow right along the side, where an eyebrow piercing would have been. Nick looks up at him, wide green eyes and a soft mouth and an expression Harry can’t quite read. 

“Yeah, I know,” Harry tells him finally, and then forces his heart back into his body before he can get to finishing the task. 

Harry thunders downstairs after the haircut and gathers everyone in the lounge for the big reveal, like a teen movie. Niall makes a trumpeting noise and Cara stamps on the floor like rolling applause as Nick sashays down the bannister, vamping at every turn. Harry laughs loud and happy and Fiona giggles so hard she has to wipe her eyes. Everyone agrees he looks nice. Harry thinks he looks nice. 

“It would’ve been better if I’d have done it,” Gemma says, flashing Harry a knowing sort of smirk. Harry’s cheeks go hot. 

“Shut up,” he mumbles, and elbows her in the stomach. 

 

 

Harry used to be a student. He studied politics at a university now defunct, home to one of the nastier gangs in the city. He was doing well. He was probably going to get a first. 

These days, politics are about as useful as an electric heater. The power grid has been down for ages, and there aren’t enough people for polls or elections. Harry’s careers advisor had told him that he should go for something with more practical application, but he never suspected he’d be wishing he’d done agriculture because they all can’t survive on tinned goods alone and he can’t stop thinking about planting the back garden or maybe part of the Heath. He’s so tired of porridge and tinned beans that sometimes he thinks the sight of yet another tin opener will drive him to abject madness. 

After a long day of nearly fruitless — _ha_ — scavenging, farming is starting to sound more and more essential to their continued existence. They had a paltry tea of beans two hours ago and Harry’s stomach hasn’t stopped making sounds of protest since. Someone’s going to get scurvy if they can’t find some vitamin C. 

Harry can tell Nick isn’t asleep either, because he’s not snoring. Maybe Nick’s thinking about those empty shelves too. 

“What did you do in uni?” Harry asks Nick, before he can stop himself.

“Media Studies,” Nick mumbles, twisting in the blankets so that he’s facing Harry. Puppy snuffles at their feet, gets up and circles around before she settles again. “’N business. My dad wanted me to. It was rubbish.” 

Harry tucks that bit of Nick’s past in his mind safely, like pirate treasure. “I was doing politics.” It feels weird to say out loud. That used to be the first thing Harry told someone when they met.

“Did you want to be a politician?” Nick’s eyes are half-closed, a little smile playing over his mouth. The scar on his forehead shines in the flickering light from the window. The moon seems brighter now that the city lights are all gone. They can see fistfuls of stars on a clear night. 

“I don’t remember,” Harry admits. Probably, but Harry Before isn’t someone he knows anymore, really. Images linger hazily in Harry’s memory like a story, or an old film he may have seen once: Harry Before sleeping late, Harry Before fixing his hair before a house party, Harry Before taking a pretty girl home, the world flickering in and out of frame. 

Nick’s pinky finger edges over Harry’s on the sheet. Nick’s fingers are the longest Harry has ever seen, elegantly tapered at the nail. Harry turns his hand over and twines their fingers tight so the bones rub together. Harry wants to kiss him. 

“I miss radio.” Nick’s face bends towards their clasped hands, long eyelashes throwing shadows across his cheeks. Slowly, deliberately, he sweeps his thumb over Harry’s. The graze is so gentle, but Harry feels it down to his toes. “Late night music, you know. The decks. Even the early mornings.” 

Harry wants to ask, ‘what were you really like then?’ but he thinks that’s a bit intrusive. He pictures Nick Before wearing big headphones, speaking into a microphone and smiling. In the magazines, Nick Before always grinned up from the shiny pages like he was looking at a friend. 

Nick is still stroking his hand. He wonders if he would let Harry kiss him, just a bit. 

“What did you like best?” he asks instead, “Like, about radio?”

Nick hums, eyes sliding shut. “The music, of course. But also I liked… the company, I guess. Knowing people were listening. Telling stories, that was nice. Seeing the texts come in. I liked the attention, me.” 

Harry looks down at their fingers. Nick’s thumb has stopped its motion but he hasn’t let go. Their hands look right together: they fit like silver forks in a cutlery drawer. “That sounds nice.” 

“Yeah.” Nick’s voice is soft, a little creaky. 

Harry wants to kiss him so badly his stomach curdles, but he forces himself to keep to his own pillow. They fall asleep still holding hands.

 

 

Not even Louis can deny it: another set of legs really does help their weekly water harvest. None of them wants to rely solely on rain so every few days they tramp over to the ponds to fill every container they can manage, lugging pails and dragging rubbish bins back to the house to sterilise. It’s two hours of sweat, losing liquid they’ll need to make up later. 

Nick and Harry walk through the park after, Puppy gambolling ahead of them peering at suspicious roots. The paved paths are starting to sprout greenery through the cracks, grass intruding over the grey stone. The dirt paths are nearly obliterated. Harry keeps a compass in his pocket. 

“The whole of the hill to ourselves on a Sunday evening,” Nick marvels, bumping against Harry’s shoulder as they walk close. “Who could have imagined?” 

Before, Harry and his mates would set up under a tree on a sunny Saturday and there’d be people everywhere, laughing, chatting, jogging past in fluoro vests. Maybe they’d see someone toss aside a plastic bottle and Harry would mutter about waste under his breath, or a nearby woman with big sunglasses would tell her friend at pitch volume what she heard Sean say at the pub last night, and no matter where Harry was he’d hear children shrieking. 

Now the birds are the only chatterers, whistling private tunes from tree to tree. The grass is so thick in places that Puppy tunnels through like a miniature Godzilla, yipping joyfully and chasing the squirrels.

They sit on a bench at the top of Parliament Hill. The landscape is silent: St Paul’s, the immobile curve of the London Eye, the cold grey tooth of the Shard. The bloated Thames spilling over central London. Somewhere inside that stillness there are people. Survivors. The leftovers, like they are. 

“They used to graze cows in the Colosseum,” Harry says. “After Rome fell.” 

“Cows can’t go down stairs, can they?” Nick shifts, arm rubbing electric against Harry’s. “Wouldn’t want to take them up the Gherkin, would you? Unless they were executive cows. Finance milkers, you know.”  

“Maybe we could find some. Graze them here.” Harry looks out at the field below. Before, it had been a track, but the earth has all but reclaimed it. “We could have cheese, and milk and that. Set up proper.” 

“Think you have to learn to make cheese.” 

“We could go to the library.” Harry leans forward, chin in hand. To his right, Puppy valiantly chases a squirrel until it scampers up a tree and she barks plaintively up at it, thwarted. “We’ll run out of food if we don’t figure it out.” 

Harry can’t stop thinking about the emptying shelves. Every time they scavenge from another rotting shop they get a little closer to the day they won’t be able to rely on the refuge from a world that died over a year ago. To survive, humans will have to learn how to farm again. Forage. Hunt. Live off the land. Remember everything they’ve forgotten. 

Harry’s hungry. He’s always hungry. 

The skyline shimmers under the sun. It’s never become less jarring to look over those still streets, all vehicular traffic replaced by rabbits and rats. Rats are scavengers, too. It’s a scavenger’s world, now. “I dunno, maybe that’s impossible.” 

“It’s not,” Nick says firmly, frowning. “It’s — no, you’re right. That’s clever. Can only live on beans for so long, right? Y’know, there are like, weird city farms around London. Maybe some of the animals survived.” 

Harry brightens and sits up a little straighter. His spine aches like it’s trying to remember how to be a proper spine, instead of a tipped-over stalk. “D’you think? We could get cows. Some sheep. Wool’s probably hard to make clothes out of, but we could try.” 

“Goats could be good,” Nick offers. “My sister had a farm and her goats were really hardy. They probably survived just fine. A horse or two, help us herd the sheep, or another dog. And chickens.” 

Harry smiles at the thought of Nick running around after chickens, flapping his massive hands at their rustling wings. “Vegetables. Orchards.” 

Nick grins. “Many, many potatoes.” 

“Infinite potatoes,” Harry agrees. It’s funny. Harry moved to London to get away from fields and here he is, wondering how to farm one. 

“What I wouldn’t do for a jacket potato,” Nick sighs. He props his chin on one hand. “Ah, the long-lost dreams of carbohydrates.” 

Harry misses potatoes too. He misses potatoes, and strawberries, and bananas. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever have a banana again. He barely remembers what they tasted like — sweet, yes, and clean, almost. Harry misses fresh fruit, and he misses pizza, and he misses the chicken panang curry from that Thai place he used to order from. “I miss curry,” Harry says, thinking of the plastic bag full of warm little boxes the delivery driver would hand over, and Nick groans. 

“Why did you have to take it there, Styles? Fuck, now _I_ miss curry. I miss _takeaway_. Food you could have brought right to your house! Imagine. There should be one here. Someone should start a business. Takeaway for the End of the World. They’d make a killing. Or be killed. One or the other.” 

“I’d have chips, with salt and gravy.” Harry conjures the smell and the heft of it, fat chips weighing down a takeaway box and staining the cardboard dark with grease. Maybe he’d drown them in curry sauce, sweet and spicy over his tongue. He should find a recipe for curry sauce. Maybe, with the right crops, they could manage it. “All hot and delicious.”  

Nick thwacks him on the head, his eyebrows doing tortured waggling. “Now you’re just being unnecessarily cruel. I just miss _carbohydrates_. Instant porridge isn’t cutting it.” 

“I miss _toast_. And butter.” The crunch of singed crusts, sweet butter coating his mouth with fat. In the first month after everything went to shit Harry and Gemma could still make toast if they speared bread and held it over a fire, but now the bread’s gone off everywhere and no one’s figured out how to make it without an oven. 

“Bread,” Nick whispers, like a prayer. “Oh, bread. D’you think we’ll ever have bread again? I regret every day I didn’t eat bread. Why didn’t I eat bread? Why didn’t I eat nowt but bread for my entire twenties?” 

“Dunno, why didn’t you?” 

“London infected me, Harry Styles. Goji berries and salad. Rubbish.” Nick shakes his head. “If I could turn back time…” 

“If I could turn back time!” Harry sings loudly, on impulse, “If I could find — c’mon, Nick, you know the words, go on —”

Nick joins in, and they sing Cher until they can’t dredge up any more lyrics, which is about at the end of the first verse. He doesn’t miss curry as much, after. 

Harry’s chest expands, all silly lightness like a helium balloon’s replaced his ribcage. He leans against Nick’s arm and steals warmth from the cooling air. He drops his head onto Nick’s shoulder, the thunk of his heavy skull slotting perfectly into the notches of Nick’s collarbone. Nick looks down at him, a little amused but not displeased. Harry smiles up at him and thinks, _I’m glad I met you_. Nick’s jaw is stubbly and a little muddy and his eyes are so, so kind. 

“You know what I miss most, though, honestly?” Nick pushes a bit of curl away from Harry’s eyes, then puts his hands back in his lap before Harry can recover breath. “My music collection. It was all on my laptop, my pride and joy, and now that’s just…” 

“Dead metal,” Harry suggests, turning his cheek down over where Nick’s bony shoulder edges up through his jacket. 

“Dead metal,” Nick agrees. He drops his hand so that it covers Harry’s knee, thumb rubbing rhythmically over the joint. The heat of it spreads up through Harry’s body and drives out the chill. “Years of acquisition and it’s all buried in there, never to return. ’S a bit weird, innit? All that stuff?” 

Harry nods, pressing closer. “All my pictures were on my computer too. And my music. Didn’t even have CDs, not that those would help.” 

“All gone.” Nick looks out over the city. Dusk is falling, but no lights bright up the skyline. “Fresh start, I suppose.” 

“Not always. Bit smelly, you are,” Harry tells him, and then laughs as Nick shoves him off the bench. 

Harry’s still thinking about Nick’s music collection when they start back down the hill to the house, Puppy ambling ahead of them. Nick’s laptop, wherever it is now, will probably be dead metal forever, but there might be something else they could do. 

 

 

Harry tells Zayn his idea after dinner and doesn’t expect to hear much back for a long while, maybe months. Instead, three days later Harry wakes to a sharp rap on his and Nick’s door. He struggles out of bed, shushing a groggy Nick back under the covers. Zayn stands in the doorway, fully dressed with a waterproof jacket over his hoodie. 

“Found something yesterday,” Zayn says, unable to keep the excitement from bursting through the cracks of his hushed voice. “Think I’m onto it. Want to come?” 

Harry’s heart jolts. “I’ll be downstairs in five.” Zayn beams and turns to clamp downstairs, already wearing his boots and turning his collar up as he goes. 

“Mm?” Nick swims in the duvet covers, hair going everywhere. “Wazzat?” 

“Zayn,” Harry explains unhelpfully, pulling on jeans and his sturdiest boots. “We’ve got a thing today. Back around dinner.” 

Nick frowns, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “A thing?” 

Harry nods, then tugs a jumper over his other jumper. It’s winter and cold on a bicycle, especially if it’s raining. 

Nick’s face, when Harry emerges from his jumper, is drawn and pale. “Be careful,” Nick tells him, jaw tight. 

Part of Harry thrills — _worry about me,_ sings his childish heart _—_ but the rest only wants to smooth out the worried crinkle in Nick’s forehead. “We’ll be okay,” he promises. It’s a bit of a hollow oath and they both know it. “Zayn’s a pro and I’m not bad myself. We’ll be back. Hopefully with presents.” 

“Well I do love a pressie,” Nick says, fending off Puppy’s wiggling kisses with one arm. 

Harry lingers in the doorway for a moment, wondering how to say goodbye. At the last minute he bounds up onto the bed to place a hasty kiss to Nick’s stubbly cheek. “See you later,” he says, face hot, and then leaves before he has to look Nick in the eye. 

“Y’alright?” Zayn peers at him from the foot of the stairs as he comes down, pulling a jacket over his jumper. “You’re all flushed.” 

“Fine,” Harry says, ducking his face so Zayn can’t examine it too closely. 

Zayn isn’t convinced. “Want me to check? Could be a fever.” 

“Nah,” Harry says, reaching for a scarf to blanket his neck. “Let’s head out.” 

They take bicycles, big rucksacks balanced on their backs stuffed with rope in case they find something big. It’s not raining yet, but it probably will soon: the same drizzle as always, chilling them to the bone. Harry can barely feel the biting wind, though, trailing behind Zayn’s path up the deserted streets, dodging holes in the paving and discarded rubbish. A small herd of deer cluster in an an overgrown garden. They turn their narrow faces to watch the bicycles pass. 

Harry’s legs ache but the open air feels good, even with the rotting whiffs of decomposing city. He doesn’t know how long they travel. They pass a soggy soft toy giraffe on the pavement, a smeared newspaper, a rucksack with clothes spilling out like blood. 

Harry tries to look straight ahead. He puts sorrow in a tight box and shuts the lid, sinks the box to the bottom of his body and pedals faster. 

With a rattle of gears, Zayn pulls up in front of a nondescript Edwardian terraced house. “Here. Windows aren’t broken; that’s a good sign.” 

“Or there could still be people,” Harry points out. 

Zayn shakes his head. “No water source for ages, I don’t think. Not sustainable.” 

They approach the house slowly anyway. The door is still locked. Zayn slips his heavy gloves on and fishes a wrench from his rucksack. The coloured pane window next to the door only takes two whacks before it shatters into uneven pieces. Harry reaches for the hole but Zayn catches his hand and pulls more of the glass away first. Harry feels blindly through the jagged space for the lock and undoes the clasp with clumsy fingers. 

The door swings open. Zayn kicks glass aside and coughs at the billow of stale air. If Harry hadn’t believed Zayn’s assessment of the house’s liveability, the thick coat of dust everywhere would have convinced him. No one’s been here for months. 

“Where are we?” Harry asks, making his way to the kitchen on instinct. The stench of rotting food greets him and he coughs, pulling his scarf over his nose and mouth. 

“The residence of John Nelson, antique music collector,” Zayn informs him, smile audible from under his own scarf mask. 

Harry blinks at Zayn. “How the hell did you find _that_ out?” Sometimes, Harry could swear Zayn is a wizard. No Google, no internet, yet finds the home address of some record hoarder in three days. It’s unnerving, how stealth clever Zayn can be. 

“Checked the books of that record store by the H&M,” Zayn explains, sounding very pleased. He roots through the cupboards, tossing Harry viable tins that Harry packs away neatly in their bags. “They had his address on file. _Paper_ file. Thought they might. Analogue types.” 

Harry shakes his head, stacking tinned fish over the beans. “You’re a bloody genius.” 

“I know.” Zayn examines the back of some peanut butter. “Fuck. Gone off. It’s that organic shit, no preservatives.” 

Harry used to like that organic shit. These days, he could smash the gourmet jars for the good they do them. Zayn’s cupboard only fills a fourth of their bags and they root through the rest of the shelves. Harry recoils automatically at the wriggling maggots that twist grubbily in the bin, but he finds a tin opener and a packet of matches in a drawer, so that compensates a little for the horrible stench. 

The bathroom provides soap, half a bottle of anti-dandruff shampoo, paracetamol, plasters and two and a half loo rolls. Once their bags are mostly filled with essentials they feel relatively justified in sourcing out John Nelson’s music collection. 

Harry tears through the first floor, opening the doors to two bedrooms and scowling at each before begrudgingly checking for batteries or candles or shoes. He finds a few pairs of dress shoes that seem impractical.

“Bingo!” Zayn shouts faintly from somewhere in the house. Harry dumps the shoes and follows the sound of his voice. 

Zayn stands beaming in the centre of a little study on the ground floor. The room holds a big oak desk, an office chair and about five different kinds of music players. Most of them are useless now, but there — in the corner, two antique gramophones with hand-cranks. 

“Oh my god,” Harry breathes, going to inspect them more closely. “I didn’t — I didn’t think we’d actually find anything. Are there records?” 

“Right here,” says Zayn, and holds up a handful of paper folders. “Don’t think these’ll play anything modern, but…” Zayn looks up at Harry, eyes massive in his etched face. 

“They’re music,” Harry agrees. They grin at each other. “Okay, let’s test them.” 

Both of the machines work, albeit with a lot of disconcerting scratching sounds, and they test the weight of each for a moment until Harry spots a little suitcase-looking case by the door. It’s massively heavy, but when Harry opens it the lid reveals the circular turn of a record player. A hand-crank juts from the front. Portable gramophone. 

“Thank you, John Nelson,” marvels Zayn, and Harry nods. 

“Let’s take two. This one, and another. Don’t know if we could fix one, if it broke.” 

They leave their stash in the front room and have lunch in John Nelson’s study, trying to fumble through the gramophones to produce any sound at all. They locate the sound of trumpets, but also screeching. Eventually they give up and finish their tins of tuna, which feels, in the flush of success, like a feast for kings. 

After going through the rest of the house they load up their bicycles carefully, winding the gramophones to each bicycle rack with layers of rope. Zayn asks Harry to hold his bicycle up and he runs back inside only to emerge with a plastic bin bag that he drapes over the exposed gramophone.

“In case of rain,” Zayn explains. 

They wheel their heavy bicycles out to the pavement. Harry sends a brief prayer to whatever god still exists that no one will come after them on their journey, because with this weight they’ll stand little chance of getting away. _Or,_ he amends mentally, _if that’s too much to ask for, let any pursuers be on foot. And injured._

Zayn stares heavenward at the low-lying grey clouds. Harry thinks he’s probably doing what he just did. Praying. “Right.” Zayn sets his narrow shoulders and mounts his bicycle. “Let’s go back.” 

By some grace of god or fate or chance they wobble their way back to their street unnoticed, arriving just as the sun starts to set behind the clouds. They’re both breathing hard as they dismount their bicycles, untying each phonograph and setting them carefully on the step before storing the bicycles around back in the shed. 

Hands full, Harry knocks on the front door with his elbow, and Perrie answers the door. 

“What’s — _oh_.” Perrie stares at the machine in Zayn’s arms. “Does it work?” 

“We got two,” Zayn says proudly. “They both do. Well, did where we found them, anyway, kind of. Was a bit of a long ride back.” 

They carry their loot to the kitchen and unload the bags from their aching shoulders. Harry feels so light when he removes his rucksack that he could float all the way up to the ceiling. His back aches. 

“Good haul?” Perrie opens Harry’s backpack, beaming at the loo roll. 

“Okay. Not a lot of food, but some other stuff.” Harry helps Zayn unload tins from the other bag and they line everything up, organising it all by type so they can add to the list of supplies. “Where’re the others?”

“Louis and Liam are in their room, Fi and Nick are out on the Heath with Puppy, dunno where Gem is — upstairs reading I think, she finished dinner prep about ten minutes ago — and Cara and Niall went looting.” Perrie starts to put the tins away, and Harry handles the grains. 

“When? No more’n half the house gone at once.” Zayn frowns, passing Harry a bag of long-stemmed rice. “That’s the rule.” 

“You two are back and Fi and Nick only just left,” Perrie says, hoisting herself onto the worktop to reach the higher shelves. “Niall and Cara only went to the next street over, anyway. We haven’t checked all those houses.” 

“Still,” mumbles Zayn. “We shouldn’t — we have that rule for a reason.” 

“Bring it up at house meeting,” Harry suggests. He doesn’t disagree, really. No more than half the house gone at one time seems generous, after what happened with their supplies in autumn. Only Niall and Liam had been at home and they weren’t enough to defend the house against the scavengers and their knives. It’d been a hungry fortnight before they’d built up enough stores not to be as nervous for winter. “Here, let’s set up the gramophones in the lounge.” 

They store the portable gramophone by the bookcase and set the other on the little table by the blue sofa. Perrie pokes at the fire until it’s going more or less properly again and Harry fans out the records on the coffee table, tracing over the names and faces. “The Waltz of the Bells” _,_ Blind Joe Reynolds, “Sunflower Dance.” He doesn’t recognise any of them. Harry and Zayn drape blankets over everything after it’s all set up. 

“For the surprise,” Harry says. 

Perrie laughs. “And it’s not even Christmas.”  

Harry blinks. “Is it December already?” 

“Mm-hm. Twentieth, or something.” 

The girls keep track of the days. Harry hadn’t been sure why until he woke up one day last summer and realised that he had no idea if it was a Thursday or a Sunday, or if it was June or July. And, like Gemma says, there’s a reason the first calendars were kept by women. 

In eleven sunrises, the year will be 2015.

Cara and Niall get back first. The promised rain has finally started, and both of them shake their wet hair out in the stairwell and hang their wet shoes on the drying rack. Niall squeezes water out of his jumper onto Harry’s hair before running upstairs to change. 

They’re setting up for dinner by the time Fiona, Nick and Puppy reappear. Puppy is joyfully drenched, muddy and wriggling. Fiona and Nick are equally muddy but considerably less pleased. 

Harry stands inconspicuously in front of the blanketed table. “Biblical flood?” 

“Practically,” Fiona says, yanking at her wellies.

“Probably is in the City, to be fair,” Cara adds, from the sofa. “Or. More, I guess.” 

“She ran into a stream,” Nick explains, tugging Puppy back before she gets mud all over the floors. “Took _eons_ to retrieve her. Makes _no_ sense, this dog. Loves a pond, loves a stream, _hates_ the rain. Kept hiding from it like it wouldn’t get her if she stayed very close to the ground.”

“She’s a ridiculous creature.” Fiona shrugs off her rain mac and accepts a towel from Zayn to get the worst of the wet out of her hair.  “Oh, hell. I’m soaked through. I’m going up to change.” 

“You go too,” Harry tells Nick, taking Puppy. “I’ll get her washed up a bit and then we can have our tea.” 

“Thanks, Haz,” Nick says with the heavy gratitude of the recently soaked. He takes the stairs two at a time, disappearing into their room. 

“Subtle,” Gemma says dryly from the doorway. “Pretty sure no one in Hampstead knew you were checking out his arse right then.” 

Harry scrunches up his face. “I am doing a _good deed_ here, Gemma.” He brandishes Puppy as evidence. She barks. “I’m going to go wash this dog now.” 

“Mm-hm,” Gemma says. “You going to show him your gramophones of love after?” 

Harry goes properly red at that. “Perrie told you? They’re meant to be a _surprise_.” 

Gemma _aww_ s, patting his cheek. “That was just a guess, but now I see it’s real,” Gemma says fondly. “Well, good luck to you, Hazza, and your wooing. I’m sure it’ll take thirty entire seconds before the boy is yours.” 

“Maybe,” mumbles Harry. Nick looks at his mouth a lot and there’s tension between them, obviously, but he feels less certain than Gemma does that anything will come of it. It’s the sort of wire that could snap or dissolve in water. 

 

 

 When they’re clearing everything away after dinner — rice and beans for the humans, and little bowl of dog food on the floor for Puppy, and then dried fruit for afters — Zayn stands up from the table and clears his throat. 

“Haz and I went out today and came back with a little surprise.” Zayn, when he’s happy, could probably power most of the house with the warmth in his eyes. Harry wiggles in his seat. Even Niall, whose knee has been acting up, and Fiona, whose hair remains damp over her goose-pimpled neck, look excited. “C’mon, it’s in the lounge.” 

They crowd through. Harry and Zayn exchange delighted looks by the covered table. Harry nearly wriggles with excitement and nerves. It’s like Christmas, really. Five days early. He really — he hopes Nick likes it. The records aren’t what Nick favours, really, there’s no A$AP Rocky or the Weekend or anything, but it’s _music_. Music more than them singing over the washing up, music more than the drumbeats Niall conjures up over the table with a knife and fork. 

“Let’s count them down,” says Perrie, clapping her hands like she’ll be surprised too, even though she knows what’s under the cloth. And Gemma, apparently, but she’s not giving it away. 

“One, two _, three!_ ” 

Zayn pulls the cover from the stacks of records and Harry yanks the blanket from the gramophone. Everyone is quiet for a second until Harry can almost see the connections link up in their minds. Niall gives a great shout first. 

“Fucking hellfuck,” Niall swears, rushing forward to get a better look. “This really works, then? Holy shit. Where the fuck did you find this?” 

“Zayn found it,” Harry says proudly. “It was amazing. He’s a proper detective.” 

“Harry’s idea in the first place,” Zayn adds, and they grin at each other. 

“Let’s have a party,” Cara suggests, peering over Niall’s shoulder as he winds the gramophone crank. “A finally, some fucking real music party.” 

Harry grins. “Like New Year’s Eve… Or, uh. New Year’s Eve Eve. Eve Eve. Lots of eves.” 

“Or Louis’s birthday,” Liam adds. 

Louis kicks him in the ankle. “That’s a myth. That’s not a real thing at all.” 

Liam wraps around Louis, nose pressing into his cheek. “Louis’s birthday when he turns about twenty-one, how’s that?” 

“Better,” says Louis. 

“We should bring out the alcohol,” Niall adds, and there’s a general roar of approval. 

“Let’s build up the fire a bit first,” Liam says sensibly, but he’s beaming, so Harry knows he’s pleased. 

“This is great, Harry,” Louis tells him seriously, hand on Harry’s elbow. “This was a great idea.” 

Harry ducks his head and Louis goes off with Liam to get the firewood from the kitchen. 

Nick hasn’t said anything yet. He’s knelt over the stacks of old records, turning the cases over in his hands and running delicate fingers over the names. His face is bent down, hidden from the flickering light of their dying fire. 

Zayn, Perrie and Niall hover over the gramophone, poking bits and examining the crank as it whirs. Fiona’s stood a little off, by the other sofa. Harry makes his way over to her, not looking away from Nick for very long. 

“Is this… okay?” Harry asks, nodding towards Nick’s bent head. “I thought… he said he missed his music, so. That’s what gave me the idea.” 

Fiona nods and wipes at her cheek and that’s when Harry realises she’s crying a little, which jolts him right to the core. “Yeah, Haz. This is… This means a lot to him. And me. All of us.” She laughs, a watery little chuckle. “I feel ridiculous. I’m not weepy, normally.” Harry pats her arm and Fiona smiles. “I must have missed it all more than I thought. Music used to… It was so important to us, Before.” 

“It’s not going to be what you had on Radio 1,” Harry warns, pulling at his lower lip. 

“I know.” Fiona rubs Harry’s back, right along the soreness of his spine. “That’s okay, Harry. It’s still wonderful.” 

Liam and Louis return with firewood and they build up the flame to a healthy glow. Nick and Niall puzzle out the workings of the gramophone — apparently Harry and Zayn had done it a bit wrong when they tested it, which makes that screeching sound they heard more logical — and Cara and Gemma clear the centre of the floor. Fiona leaves and then returns with an armful of liquor bottles. 

Good thing about hard liquor: indefinite shelf life. Bad thing about hard liquor: they can’t spare the mixers. They’ll be drinking from the bottle, straight. 

“You want to DJ, Grimmy?” Niall asks, passing him a stack of records and a bottle of whiskey. “Bonafide professional, and all.” 

“He doesn’t even know how to mix,” Fiona grumbles fondly. 

“It’s about _selection_ ,” Nick corrects, sticking his tongue out. He unscrews the top of the bottle and sniffs it, making a face. He drinks anyway, throat long. “ _Speaking_ of selection.” 

Harry rolls his eyes. “Mixing wouldn’t do much good with these, anyhow. Not CDs, are they?” 

“I did a course for records, once,” Nick says thoughtfully. “When I was a kid. Might remember some of it.” 

Nick remembers some of it. The music sounds old, rollicking twenties jazz and easy lilting melodies from the turn of the last century. It’s been so long since Harry’s heard music like this — instruments all together, voices over that — that even the tracks he would’ve found boring in his old life seem to ignite every part of his brain in joy. An unnerving number of holiday songs litter the records: Silent Night and Joy to the World and Oh Holy Night, songs that feel like cozy fireplaces and cheesy family dinners. To think there’d been a time his friends had whinged about too much of this. He can hardly imagine that now. 

Harry feels happier and dizzier with every swig of vodka. They all dance. Cara and Gemma try to teach each other how to Charleston without fully knowing the technique to start with, and Liam and Louis do a clumsy waltz around the periphery of the rug. Zayn and Perrie are the best, all hips. Harry dances with his sister and has a giggly tango with Niall and then he’s sprawled along the beige sofa watching Nick’s intent focus as he swaps a record out for another one. There’s something extremely sexy about that sort of businesslike competency. Harry wonders what he must have been like DJing in a club, Before. All handsome, he’d bet, stood behind those intimidating decks with headphones slung around his neck. 

“C’mere,” Harry says, reaching his arm out lazily and wriggling his fingers.  

“Hm?” Nick asks, looking up from the gramophone. “Did you want something, Harold?” 

Harry nods, easing himself up to sitting. “C’mere. Let Niall take the decks. Dance with me.” 

Nick looks over to Niall, who shrugs and comes over. “I don’t mind,” Niall says. “Go on.” Nick passes Niall the bottle and follows Harry out onto their little dance floor. Perrie mouths something suspiciously like _get it_ at Harry over Zayn’s shoulder. 

The record change is squawkier when Niall does it, but not by much. Horns pipe out, oozing class. Harry pictures dark rooms with women in silk dresses and men in hats. 

“Mamie Smith,” Nick says, jerking his head back at the record player. “I know this one. Crazy Blues, maybe the first Blues record ever released.” 

Harry grins and offers his right hand. Nick takes it, with an odd little swivel that could be a curtsy, to someone who had never seen a curtsy. Harry puts his left hand to Nick’s shoulder and steps closer into the orbit of Nick’s body. It’s like the sun. Harry can’t move away. Nick touches him delicately, his hand careful on his waist. 

“Dancing lessons?” Nick asks, looking down at their feet as they start to move. 

“I took some,” Harry says, trying not to step on Nick’s toes and failing spectacularly. Nick, bless him, attempts to contain his wince, then steps on Harry’s toes in return. They snort in unison. “Don’t remember much.” 

“Me neither,” Nick says, but they keep on anyway, making clumsy upbeat waltz steps around each other’s overlarge feet. Harry tries a spin under Nick’s arm and crashes into Perrie, who cackles with laughter. 

A scratching sound and a “Sorry!” from Niall, and then the next record starts up slowly. A man’s voice settles over the room, deep and crackly over the old recording. Harry remembers this song. It’s a New Year’s song.  

Nick’s arm circles the span of Harry’s waist. They’re so close now their chests press together. With just a little push Harry could tilt forward and put his mouth to Nick’s ear. He closes his eyes and leans until their cheeks bump, warm and a little stubbly. Nick tucks their hands in the small space between them, clasped right next to their hearts. 

Harry wants to breathe Nick in forever, the smell of rain and bodies a little stale but intoxicating. They’re not dancing so much as swaying like windswept branches. Nick’s body is so warm.

 _Should old acquaintance be forgot_ , the man sings, and Harry and Nick rock slowly, cheek to cheek. 

The song ends in trumpets, hopeful and unbearably sad. Harry clings onto Nick for the silent moment before Niall fumbles over to the next selection. They draw apart to the strands of a jazz tune beginning. 

“Thanks,” Harry says lamely, rubbing the back of his neck. He can’t tell if he feels sober or drunker than he ever has before. A little of both, maybe. 

“Yeah,” Nick says, eyes stripped bare as winter trees. He shakes it off, grinning that cavalier grin. “Well. Right then. Should get back to the gramophone, give Niall a few pointers.” 

“Of course,” Harry nods, ducking his head. Fiona tugs him down to the blue sofa after Nick walks off and puts her damp, curly head on his shoulder. 

“You’re a sweetheart,” she tells him softly, patting his knee. “I’m glad we found you.” 

“Me too,” Harry says, watching his housemates dance. He rests his cheek on her hair. “I’m glad you found me, too.” 

 

 

The party splits up eventually, trickling upstairs much later than normal, like a bunch of nanas on New Year’s Eve. 

Upstairs, Nick changes out of his jeans and is conspicuously silent. The room is so dark, moon a pale crescent behind cloud cover. Harry shifts nervously in the bed as Nick climbs up to join him. He can feel the shift in the air, maybe like animals do before an earthquake. It buzzes through his veins. Nick’s been looking him like that sometimes, but it hasn’t been so soft as this. So wondering. 

“What?” Harry asks, pulling the covers over his shivering knees. 

“Hey. Haz, did you — ” Nick touches Harry’s hand and then pulls back, shoving his hands into his lap. “Uh, never mind. Don’t matter. Where’s Puppy got to? Is she still downstairs?” 

Harry’s heart swoops. “What? What did I?” 

Nick looks like he’s about to answer but then he makes a strange, squawking sound and pulls the duvet over his head. “I think I’m still drunk,” he says, when Harry ducks under to join him in the warm dark.

Harry laughs. “You don’t say.” 

“Shurrup.” Nick kicks out towards Harry and Harry catches his foot. “Harold, don’t touch that, you don’t know where it’s been.” 

“I know exactly where it’s been,” Harry says. “And that is, nowhere near a bath in the past few days.” 

“It’s been _cooold_.” Nick snickers and kicks further out, his foot twisting from Harry’s grip. Harry has his skinny ankle instead. He fingers the bone, rolling the joint with his fingers. Nick goes quiet, his breathing close in their fabric cave. 

Harry reaches until he finds Nick’s knee, bony and warm, then slides up a little bit, over the coarse hair of his skinny thigh. “This — this okay?”

Nick breathes in sharp, shuffles closer. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s okay.” 

Their faces bump as they move towards each other, noses getting in the way and chins doing confusing things until everything slots together in a warm rush and they’re kissing, deep and wet. Harry pushes forward until he’s most of the way into Nick’s lap, arms around him so he can dig into the flesh of Nick’s back. Nick’s tongue pushes hot into Harry’s mouth and Harry sucks it in, wraps his legs around Nick’s waist and they breathe so loudly Harry worries anyone out on the street could hear. 

“Shit,” Harry says, pulling back so he’s panting into the close air. He bats the duvet off of them. “Shit, is there, like. Lube? And condoms?” Louis and Liam must have some. Maybe he could run up and ask them, just really quick. 

Nick laughs and cradles Harry’s head in his big hands. One thumb traces the line of Harry’s cheekbone, around towards his ear and down to his chin. “We’ll hit Tesco or summat, if not.” 

Harry grins and kisses him again, deliriously happy, remnants of vodka flooding through his veins. “I’ve wanted to do this _forever_ ,” he says, pulling back to breathe. 

“Forever?” Nick runs his hands over Harry’s back, leaving trails of prickling nerves running up and down his skin. 

“Yup.” Harry can’t see Nick very well, which is a little frustrating because he wants to know what Nick’s lips look like kissed swollen and used. Still, he can feel Nick through the thin fabric of their pants, pressing up against him hot and hard and making him tremble. “Oh, fuck,” he pants, when Nick’s cock slides against his. “Oh, fucking hell, Grim.” 

Nick pulls him in, panting. “How the fuck are you real,” he whispers, as Harry bites into his neck. “How the hell did I get here? Oh, god don’t — don’t stop, fuck.” 

Harry fumbles between them to get his hands on Nick’s cock, soft skin and firm heat. He sweeps his thumb over the weeping head to catch Nick’s gasp. Nick’s hands shake but they’re electric on Harry’s skin and they kiss fiercely, pulling each other off. Harry can’t keep quiet. He’s going to come so fast, he’s about to, he can feel it rising inside him — 

“What? Why the fuck did you —”

“Shh,” Nick says, and bends down to take Harry’s cock in his mouth. 

Harry comes faster than he has since he was fifteen. 

When Harry regains more of his thought process Nick is smirking. “Easier clean-up,” he says, wiping his lip. 

Harry’s pretty sure he could be up for it again in about thirty seconds. It’s been a long, long dry spell. 

He finishes Nick off with a careful handy, biting his neck more and then wiggling down to suck him off properly like Nick had done. Nick comes with a strangled gasp and tastes bitter and strange, maybe a side effect of the complete lack of fruit and veg in their lives, but Harry likes it all the same. He licks the corner of his mouth. 

“Fuck,” Nick says, collapsing against the pillows. 

“Tomorrow.” Harry pokes Nick until there’s room for him and curls into the sweet hot curve of his neck, arm clenching around the narrow barrel of his ribs. “Gonna fuck tomorrow.”

“Gotta —” Nick yawns, muffling the sound into Harry’s hair. “Gotta get lube, and condoms first.” 

“I’ll nick some off Louis and Liam.” 

“Bad form.” Nick pokes Harry’s side. “We should get our own. Last longer.” 

“You saying you’ll want a repeat?” 

Nick is quiet, so Harry fumbles up for his face to check if he’s smiling. He is. Harry traces the line of it, smiles back when Nick kisses the fingertips that brush his mouth. It’s very sweet. Harry had thought sweetness might have been something that was mostly lost, after everything, like fresh fruit and takeaway. 

Harry falls asleep happy. He got what he wanted. He’d almost forgotten how good that feels. 

 

 

When the sickness came, the wealthy fled the city as fast as royal courts in times of the plague. Hampstead was vacant long before Harry and the rest moved in, which has proven lucky: not all the shops were ransacked.  

In the quest for lubricant they could try to break in to a few houses down the road and hope for the best, but there’s a pharmacy a ten-minute walk away Harry and Zayn had hit once a few months back and Harry’s pretty sure lube isn’t a priority for looters. It wasn’t for them, anyhow. 

Nick leaves Puppy with Niall and Gemma and they bundle up on the pretence that they’re off to find some clothes for Nick. They’ll try Marks & Spencer on the way, Harry figures.

The sky hangs overcast and oppressive above them, drizzling rain and then tapering off. Nick darts nervously down the street and Harry laughs, pulling him back. 

“It’s okay. Not usually anyone around here,” he explains, looping their arms together. “The nearest gang is Camden and they don’t bother with us, mostly. Most people are further in. Not a lot of big shops here, so.” 

Nick’s eyes slide from the green of the park to the red brick houses. There’s no one about but the birds, as usual. In the summer the neighbourhood gets busier: deer and rabbits. They walk in the middle of the street. 

Glass crunches underfoot on the main road: looters have smashed most of the windows. The pharmacy door swings open easy, unlocked. Painkillers have been cleared, all antiseptic, and flu and cough medicine; but the condoms and sexual health area is spotless. 

“Lots of little looting gang babies getting born, I guess,” Harry says, nodding at the shelves. 

“Passion fruit?” Nick inquires, resting his chin on Harry’s shoulder. “Sweet strawberry? Very cherry?” 

Harry snorts, picking up the neon green Durex bottle. “Better sex!” he quotes, and examines the label more closely. “Passion fruit. Don’t know if I’ve ever had that before. Probably never will now, huh?” 

“It’s weird. All yellow, with seeds. Ultimate London, like goji berry. Now put that rubbish away,” Nick demands, swatting at Harry’s hands. “This is fucking we’re getting to, not fruit salad.” 

Harry makes a very dignified expression other people might label as a pout. “I want to try passion fruit, Nicholas,” he informs him, in a very dignified tone other people might term as a whine. 

Nick pats Harry’s cheek. “It’s your mouth, love.” 

“Yes it is,” Harry says, and grins as he has won. That was quite easy. He was prepared for a great deal more very dignified expressions. 

Harry chucks a few bottles of passionfruit in with the regulars. Nick goes around the corner and returns, arms filled with tampon boxes. “Couldn’t hurt,” he says, shrugging, and loads them into the bag alongside the condoms and lube. 

Harry still gets a little thrill when they exit the shop without paying. At first he used to leave a few notes by the till, but money’s worthless now. Everyone knows that. Better to leave rice. 

They pick up stacks of plain shirts at Marks & Spencer, packets of underpants and a few thick jumpers because even though the winter’s been blessedly mild so far, there’s no guarantee it’ll stay that way. 

Nick insists on getting some trousers for Fiona, who has been complaining that hers can never get clean no matter how much they try to wash them. “She should have proper sturdy jeans,” Nick explains, flipping through a stack of denim, “Like cowboys had. Can do anything in those. Not meant to wash them much, are you?” 

Harry doesn’t want to think about how infrequently he’s washed the jeans he’s wearing. At least everyone smells, so it’s equal. 

The shop slumbers around them. Harry can hear the echoes of birdsong through the broken glass doors and the creaky sighs of buildings settling. Vines sprout through one raggedy window in womenswear, twining around a display of winter coats. Harry’s lungs wheeze thick and sluggish as they walk through the shop and leave footprints in the dusty floor. Everything is so, so still.

On their way out, Harry pushes Nick up against a rack of dresses and kisses him until they’re both trembling. Might also be the initial coughing fit from the billow of dust, but Harry likes to credit his technique. 

Nick’s stubble rasps against Harry’s chin and upper lip but he likes that, the lingering redness and the reminder. He’s getting addicted to Nick’s mouth, the way he bites and sucks and moves and tastes.

“Imagine if the shop was full,” Harry mumbles into Nick’s lips, “Imagine there were people everywhere, shoppers and assistants, and they all saw us. They all saw me do this.” He sinks to his knees and unhooks the button on Nick’s trousers, pushing the fabric down. The thick line of Nick’s cock reaches out towards him. He gets his mouth around the head, musky thickness solid on his tongue as he gets Nick sloppy wet.

Nick twists his hand in Harry’s hair and tugs, not hard, just a reminder. His laboured breathing is deafening in the silent shop, and Harry pulls off to say, “Tell me. Tell me, what it’d be like.” 

“If the shop was full?” Nick asks, voice breaking as Harry sucks him down again. Harry’s jaw aches. He likes the feel of it, the reminder. He’s alive. His jaw aches. Their eyes meet, and Nick reaches down to cup Harry’s cheek. “If they all saw you like this?” 

“Yes,” Harry says promptly, before going back down for more. Nick laughs. 

“It’d be a slow day today,” Nick says lowly, stroking hair away from Harry’s forehead. “Not a Saturday. Maybe a Wednesday. Or a Monday, mid-afternoon. Most people at work, but not us. We wouldn’t be alone, though — _ah —_ a few shoppers picking through coats, whilst — _uh_ , yes, like that —whilst the shop assistants hover around them. Rich customers, y’know. Respectable.” Harry gets his hands around to Nick’s arse and palms the fullness there, nice and soft even with Nick as thin as he is. Probably mostly muscle from all the walking. Nick makes a choked sound, and then keeps going. “We’d be tucked back in a corner looking at, uh. Winter coats. But you couldn’t wait, could you? You were too desperate.” 

Harry palms his cock in his jeans, a whimper squeezing out of his occupied mouth. That feels good, the thought of it. A full shop, and him on his knees. Cars whizzing by outside. Sirens in the distance, off to the hospital round the corner. Afternoon crowds passing the big glass windows. 

“We’d have to be quick. You’d have to do it proper, y’know. Use all your — _oh_ — your tricks.” 

That’s an invitation if he’s ever heard one, and Harry squeezes the firmness of Nick’s arse until his fingers slip into the crack and brush along Nick’s hole. Nick makes a strangled sound that goes straight to Harry’s dick. He edges the tip of his finger inside. 

Harry feels a little crazy for it all of a sudden; he wants more, he wants to suck Nick’s cock for hours, he wants to _fuck_. He wants to hear the roar of traffic, the whirring sirens, the mechanical cacophony of the city. He wants people to _see._

“Jesus, Harry,” Nick pants, and his fingers clutch rhythmically at Harry’s hair. When he comes Harry swallows it all. 

 

 

When they get home the vast majority of Harry wants to pull Nick upstairs and put their stolen goods to use. It’s been over a year since Harry’s fucked or been fucked by anyone, and the thought of continuing what they started last night is more than appealing. 

Sadly, his housemates have other plans. 

“Ooh, what’d you get?” Fiona asks as soon as they make it through the door, making grabby hands towards their bags. 

Niall doesn’t wait for them to hand anything over, just filches the rucksacks right off their backs and takes them to pour over the table so that the lube and condoms spill out onto the wood alongside boxes of tampons and packs of basic black t-shirts. Perrie darts into the kitchen behind him as if called by the siren song of loot. 

“Dibs,” Niall says immediately, scooping up a packet of condoms. 

“Second dibs,” says Perrie, plucking another box from the cluttered tabletop. 

“Hey!” Harry frowns at Niall. “Why d’you need those? We found them, fair and square.” 

“We share here, Haz,” Fiona reminds him, picking up the box of tampons and sending Nick a soft, grateful smile to which Harry feels partially entitled, but maybe Nick needs it more. 

“Neither of you boys are likely to get pregnant, are you?” Niall shrugs, pocketing a roll of Durex. “Need trumps want.” 

“Truth,” Perrie says, ducking back out into the hallway and thumping back upstairs. 

“There are STDs,” Harry points out, although he’s not really sure if that matters as much anymore. Sexual health. Pills, and doctors. He should ask Zayn. He was in training to be a nurse, before. He supposes there are some diseases they shouldn’t get, if they want to go on living comfortably. 

“The sheets are going to get filthy,” Nick says, quiet close to Harry’s ear. He sounds rather cross about it, which is understandable considering how a few days ago Nick was on laundry duty with Zayn and Gemma for six entire hours and came back with red, blistered palms. Laundry duty is always the worst one. Harry thinks even worse than cesspit, because laundry takes hours and hours and you scald your hands and you don’t even get to have a nice walk in the process. 

Niall tosses them a roll of plastic packets. “There, we’ll share a bit,” he tells him, then leaves. 

Harry watches after him for a moment. “Hey — wait. What’s he need those for?” He blinks around the room. Cara, as far as he knows, has zero interest in male genitalia, and Fiona is looking far too amused to be the cause. Perrie and Zayn are generally exclusive. 

Oh. 

_Oh._

“ _Gemma_?” 

Fiona snorts, hand to her mouth. “Sorry, Harry. Thought you knew.” 

“No I did _not_ know, thank you,” Harry snaps, although he is perfectly aware that his protective brother strop is both useless and unnecessary, considering how Gemma has never taken kindly to Harry playing those sorts of cards. “God. Well, that explains why Niall hasn’t been on the sofa at nights, lately. Jesus.” Harry starts sorting their haul, grouping items by type and maybe using a little more force than necessary when setting them down. He’s not cross they’re seeing each other, not really, but he is a little cross that neither of them had thought to _tell_ him. Bit rude. 

“I’ll get these upstairs,” Fiona says, scooping the tampon boxes into her arms. 

“Gem and Niall?” Harry asks faintly, as Fiona leaves. Nick comes up behind him, spins his hips around so that he’s up against the table. 

“Yep,” Nick agrees, then bends to press a wet kiss to the space behind Harry’s jaw and Harry abruptly stops caring altogether about anything else. 

“When were you last, like. Tested?” Harry asks, tipping his head back so Nick can map the skin of his neck more easily. 

Nick hums into Harry’s throat, pausing in his ministrations. “I think — a few months before everything? Not sure. I was clean. You?” 

Harry struggles to pick through the grey haze of his Before memories, distracted by the warm press of Nick’s nose nuzzling into his jaw. Nick’s hands are firm over his waist and one of his skinny legs presses between Harry’s, their bony hips knocking into each other. “Maybe six months before, I think. Clean, too.” 

“Very healthy, I’m sure. What with the parade of suitors marching in and out of your student flat.” Nick smirks. Harry can feel it along his collarbone where Nick is pulling the knit of his jumper out of the path of his mouth. The rasp of Nick’s stubble roughs up against Harry’s chest, sends prickling interest through his body. 

“What about _you_ ,” Harry protests, poking Nick in retaliation for the character assassination that has ensued, “I’ve heard things. Models, and model things.” 

Nick snorts. “Exaggerations. Mostly. Well, some of them.” He bites Harry’s collarbone and then licks the red that blooms there, and it’s all Harry can do to hold on. “Well, mostly not, actually. But, hey. Clean.” 

“Mostly.” Harry rolls his eyes. “Smug.” 

“ _I’m_ smug?” 

“Shut up. Think we should risk it? I mean.” Harry clutches the roll of condoms in his fist. “Eventually.” 

Nick shrugs. “Eventually.” 

Upstairs, Harry pushes Nick until he’s sprawled out the length of the bed and divests him of his clothes until he’s clad in nothing but a long stretch of skin Harry intends to map. He starts at Nick’s jaw and his neck where he bites a trail of marks that swear _I was here, I was here_ all the way down to Nick’s collarbone. Harry likes that. He likes how everyone will be able to see. 

Nick starts complaining somewhere around his chest as Harry tests the nicest ways to graze his teeth and get Nick’s nipples to stand up. Nick’s chest hair is thick and Harry _likes_ it, likes running his fingers through the roughness and the warmth underneath. Harry can feel his dick heavy and swollen between his legs and Nick’s cock hard pressing up against his belly and Nick can suck it — well, _there_ ’s an idea, actually — because Harry wants to take his sweet time. 

“For fuck’s sake,” Nick gripes, and then his hips jut up when Harry grips his side in a particular way whilst twining his tongue around his left nipple. “Will you — will you hurry up, please? You’re awful, c’mon.” 

“Nope,” Harry says cheerfully. He shimmies so that Nick’s cock slots into the space between Harry’s belly and his hipbone. It’s such a good fit there, long and hard and hot and, _yes_. Harry hadn’t been sure before, but he knows now that he wants Nick inside him first, before he wants to fuck Nick. That’s what he wants. It’s been maybe a year and half since Harry’s had anything inside but his own fingers. Every bit of his skin prickles in anticipation and the strangled sound Nick makes when Harry finally wraps his fingers around his cock is one of the nicest things he’s ever heard in his life. 

“Want to ride you,” Harry whispers, low in Nick’s ear.

Nick juts up in Harry’s grip. “Yeah,” he agrees, “Yeah, please.” 

“Want your fingers first.” 

Nick moans at that properly, all breathy. He looks a little embarrassed, after, which Harry cannot have, because he wants Nick to shout and he wants the entire house to know how good Harry’s making Nick feel. “No, don’t do the face,” Harry says, prodding at Nick’s cheek. “I like the sounds, I like you making the sounds.” 

Nick goes a bit red. Harry finds it adorable. 

“You’ve got nice hands, did you know?” Harry picks one up and twines their fingers together. Nick’s fingers are so long they loop right over Harry’s knuckles and halfway down the back of his hand. He brings one knuckle to his mouth, licking around the joint. “Longest fingers I’ve ever seen.” 

“My hands are massive,” Nick agrees, which isn’t the same thing as nice, but Harry lets it go as he has proper salivating to get to. 

“Bet they’d go deep inside me,” Harry continues, and Nick’s eyes go big. “Hit all the parts I can’t reach. Make me feel amazing.” It’s sort of stupid dirty talk, really. Harry’s always been a bit clumsy and ham-fisted with that but Nick doesn’t seem to have any complaints. 

“Get the lube,” Nick says, and Harry sits back on his heels to fish for it in the blankets. His cock juts out ahead of him and he can feel Nick’s eyes track every bob. 

He grips the lube in one hand and smirks. Nick looks like he’s properly salivating. “See summat you like?” 

“Maybe,” Nick says, and then Harry’s flipping over to his back and Nick’s above him, eyes all lit and lovely in the yellowing light. “You know what you’re working with, then?” 

Harry knows he’s big, if that’s what Nick means. He’s never had any complaints. “Maybe you should show me,” Harry suggests, with his cheekiest of smiles. 

Nick’s fingers ease slowly into Harry’s body, press up inside like there’s a blueprint somewhere Nick has memorised in anticipation. Harry’s on his back, Nick leaning over his chest as his fingers slip slowly in and out. They’re so _long_ , curling up deeper than Harry can conceive of.

Want swells in Harry’s body and pushes out unimportant things like higher brain functioning and language skills. At three fingers, Harry can’t manage full sentences, only faint gasps and hazy pleading. It’s been so long since anyone has touched him like this. Nick’s eyes are big and gentle and Harry wants so much.

“ _Please_ ,” Harry begs again, clinging to Nick’s shoulders. “Please, Nick.” 

Nick kisses him like they’re the only two people in the world. They almost are. 

Harry gets his foot flat on the bed and uses it as leverage to switch their positions. He grins, pressing Nick into the mattress. “Ha,” Harry gloats, once they’re situated. “I win.” 

Nick stares up at him, eyes are wide like a thirsty man in a desert who has just seen a stream, maybe. Like Harry is precious but a little bit terrifying, maybe an angel, or a wide river. Harry feels important. He feels special. Harry thinks he could almost live off the look on Nick’s face, and nothing else.

“Sure,” Nick says, managing a grin. “Sure, you’ve won.” 

Harry ruts their hips together a few more times before sitting up and reaching for a condom, the familiar gesture coming back easy. Body memory. He gets the wrapper off with his teeth and then rolls the rubber over Nick’s cock, quickly. 

“Smooth operator.” Nick smacks Harry’s flank lightly, then groans as Harry tips forward. 

“I’ll show you smooth,” Harry grumbles, fumbling behind him to bring Nick’s cock to his arse. He doesn’t want to wait. He wants this now. He wants this _yesterday_. 

Harry sinks down slowly, every electric inch tipping his body into more wanting. His toes clench up. He hurts a little but it’s that good pain, that unnatural fullness that only makes him hungrier for more. God, it’s good. It’s so fucking good. Harry had forgot how much he loves this. 

Nick gasps, and his skull goes back so the stretch of his neck displays itself to Harry like a present. Harry leans forward, Nick shifting inside of him and punching breath from his lungs. _Fuck_. Harry groans and sucks another bruise to Nick’s skin: _I was here_. He moves his hips slowly, circling Nick inside of him. The ache feels so, so good. Harry’s prick drips onto Nick’s belly, liquid shines over the skin. 

“ _Jesus_ , Haz, could you move, please?” Nick pleads, and Harry likes that. He wants Nick to do it again. He swivels his hips and then has to fumble for stability when Nick’s cock bumps up against his prostate. 

“ _Oh god_ ,” Harry gasps, tipping forward. Nick clutches Harry to his chest and fucks up into him, driving his cock in methodical thrusts — _inside him,_ Harry’s brain repeats, staticky — whilst Harry whines and fucks back down. 

There’s no real method beyond graceless, frenzied humping, both of them panting and overwhelmed. Harry feels near tears with it all, the closeness and the pleasure and how _alive_ he feels. He wants Nick to fuck him forever; he wants to pull Nick inside. It feels so good. Harry feels _so_ good. He never wants to go without this ever again. 

Harry grinds over Nick’s cock, taking him deep and then levering back quickly. Nick presses his face to Harry’s neck and groans.

Distantly, Harry realises that they are both being very loud in a close, poorly-soundproofed house. He couldn’t give less of a shit. The Queen herself standing next door wouldn’t be able to keep the ragged shouts from ripping through Harry every time Nick’s cock hits him just right: it’s so _much_. He hopes everyone can hear. He wants everyone to know that Nick’s sinking his teeth into Harry’s neck and digging nails into Harry’s back and fucking him, fucking him so good Harry can’t help but cry out. 

Harry comes first, biting the flesh of Nick’s shoulder in a muffled scream, and it’s not long after that Nick follows, pressing bruises into Harry’s hips, eyes shut as the pleasure courses through his body. 

“Fuck,” Harry murmurs, wrapping his arms more securely around Nick and breathing deep. He’s a bit sweaty. Harry likes that smell: sex and sweat and humanity. “Want to go again.”

Nick laughs. “Not even pulled out yet, greedy,” he says, swatting Harry’s hip. 

“I know.” Harry nuzzles further, pressing his forehead into the curve of Nick’s neck and rubbing his face through after. Nick’s so warm, and soft, and he just made Harry come. His skin tastes salty. “Still want to.” 

“We’re going to get disgusting,” Nick sighs, shifting so that he slides out of Harry’s arse and Harry whines, even if he’s nowhere near ready to go again. Nick ties off the condom and puts it gingerly on the windowsill. “How did people in ye olden days fuck? Did they just go about their days smelling like sex all the time?” 

“Wouldn’t mind.” 

“You wouldn’t. You’re disgusting,” Nick says, but he says _you’re disgusting_ like _it’s disgusting how much I like you_. “I’ve got your come all over me, you devil.” 

“Good.” 

Nick rolls his eyes and flicks Harry’s nose. 

Harry bats him off lazily, giggling and ducking Nick’s quick fingers. “Fine, wipe it on the sheets.” 

“Are you mad? These things take _eons_ to wash.” Nick reaches for a discarded sock and mops them both up, cringing as he goes along. “This is disgusting. This is so disgusting, I cannot believe this is how we live now.” 

“Mm-hm,” hums Harry, fingering Nick’s damp chest hair, tracing patterns in the swirls. “And eventually we won’t even have any condoms.” 

“Oh god.” 

Harry beams. Nick seems moderately horrified at the logistics of that, but Harry is much more interested in the idea of his come trickling out of Nick’s arse, or Nick’s come warm inside his own. He supposes they could just finish in each other’s mouths, but his idea is _so_ dirty, and hot, and he kind of loves the thought of it, if he’s honest. He’s never fucked anybody without a condom before. 

“You _like_ that, don’t you?” Nick shakes his head, flopping back onto the pillows. “Yes, you do. Lord help me, I’ve ended up with a pervert at the end of the world.” 

“Not the end of the world,” Harry says, pulling Nick over so that he’s better to cuddle. Nick can pretend all he likes that he’s not just as much of a pervert as Harry is, but Harry did not miss the way Nick’s dick twitched after he mentioned their lack of condoms. “Just the start of a different one.” 

“A philosophical pervert,” Nick sighs, settling his legs so they drape over Harry’s. He traces the edge of Harry’s ear, then kisses the lobe. “What did I do to deserve this, Harold?” 

“Dunno.” Harry snakes an arm around Nick’s waist. He wants them to wrap together. He wants to walk around octopus-twined to Nick’s body for the rest of the week. Possibly forever. He doesn’t care if that’s absurd. “Saved some kittens, probably. Rescued orphans. Saintlike standards.” 

Nick snorts, burrowing down into the bed. “Yeah. Yeah, probably.” 

They fall asleep like that, sweaty and smelly, and doze until dinner. 

 

 

After the gramophones, Chez Apocalypse undergoes a subtle shift. They don’t just scavenge anymore. They collect. 

Perrie finds a Polaroid camera in a girl’s bedroom in Bethnal Green and Niall has a knack for picking the best flats for musical instruments: he brings home warm guitars and dinky ukuleles, violins that look like silk but sound like polyester. Zayn goes out for firewood one morning and comes home with canvas bags filled with oil paints. 

“They last forever,” Zayn explains, biting his lip and rushing his loot upstairs. 

Harry keeps looking for records. What he really wants is a hand-crank gramophone that’ll play LPs, but if Santa’s not coming through on that dream he’ll settle for more Louis Armstrong. Those are hard enough to find. He’ll settle for hats, in a pinch. 

“So you and Grimmy, huh?” Niall waggles his eyebrows over a cupboard door in Belsize Park and tosses him a pack of Pot Noodle. 

Harry catches it and shoves it in his bag without checking the label. “So you and my _sister_ , huh?” 

Niall smirks. “Was wonderin’ how long it’d take you to suss that one out. Gem thought it’d be another few weeks at least, since you’re all dickmatised by former DJs, and all.” 

“Current DJ,” Harry says. He makes a mental note to dump something gross on Gemma’s head the next time they’re out scavenging-slash-collecting. “Well, don’t fuck with her.”  

“Mate, no one fucks with her.” Niall tosses him three jars of peanut butter in rapid succession. “You’ve met your sister, right? You’re on good terms?” 

Harry sticks his tongue out. “So, are you two, like… Serious?” 

“What is this, Grease? Are we going steady? I dunno, Haz.” Niall moves to the next cupboard and winces at the smell, fanning the air in front of his face. “Fucking shitballs, this is foul. Think there’s anything useful in here?” 

“Always check. We really need vitamins.” Harry shifts the bag so the Pot Noodle’s at the bottom. Their food is looking really _beige_ today. Noodles, peanut butter, rice. “And what _is_ it then?” 

“I like her.” Niall forces the neck of his jumper over his nose and starts sorting out the contents. Rot after rot, rat droppings and ancient expiry dates. “Doesn’t have to be a big thing, right? I like her, and we’re happy. Bit smelly and disgustin’, but happy. That’s good, I think. Live while we’re young, and all.” 

“Live while we’re alive,” Harry says gloomily. The fetid cupboard yields nothing. There are no vitamins in this kitchen at all, nor tinned fruit, nor tinned veg. Scurvy fast approaches. 

Niall laughs. “Yeah, mate. Live while we’re alive.” 

 

 

Nick reads a lot in the evenings and in the dead time between jobs. When he’s not, he’s scribbling in that little notebook he carries everywhere, but mostly he reads. Harry doesn’t know if Nick was a reader Before, but these days they’re all forcing themselves to be bookworms, just for something to do. 

Harry tries, but in the spaces between paragraphs his mind clicks and whirs with thoughts like _protein_ and _how do you make wool into thread_ and _was there a children’s farm near here, would they have had chickens_ and he forgets what he was reading and has trouble redirecting himself to the page. Usually he plays cards instead, or studies the framed maps on the walls. 

Apparently, one of the things Harry could have been learning about is astrology. Liam and Nick sit on the garden steps, waving incomprehensible arcs in the clear sky whilst Harry and Louis consolidate water runoff into the paddling pool. Harry’d feel more comfortable using the big plastic bins, but they need those to wheel water from the ponds. Mud sinks into the knees Harry’s jeans, chilly and damp and yet another thing he’ll have to wash later. 

“Full moon rises in the east, so at midnight it’s usually at the south. It’s easier to tell if it’s crescent, like now.” Nick holds his hand up towards the lazy orb and tilts it. “Draw a line tip-to-tip through the points, and trace it down.” 

Liam holds his hand up too, squinting. He draws a line with his pointer finger and Nick laughs, correcting the angle. 

“Follow the diagonal, Liam Payne. Point, to next point, to horizon. Where the line ends is south.” 

Nick guides Liam’s arm towards the ground. “There,” Liam says, pointing towards the shed. “South.” He drops his hand and shakes his head. “In Duke of Edinburgh they had us navigate with compasses. Or Polaris.” 

“My dad made me do Duke of Edinburgh.” Nick scrunches his nose up. “Hated it.” 

Liam snorts. “And here you are.” 

“I got bored after Bronze and then couldn’t be bothered. If they had told me I’d need marketable skills in a couple decades as the world was nigh on ending, I probably would have done a bit better. How was I supposed to know I wouldn’t be able to just turn on the electric fire?” 

“Terrible marketing, on their part.” 

“Terrible,” Nick agrees. 

“I did Silver.” Liam squints up at the sky again, and Harry leans back on his heels and squints up too. The stars blare down at them in thickets so deep Harry has no idea where constellations start or end. “Have to admit, Grimmy, I don’t have any bloody idea where Polaris goes.” 

“Find the Plough,” Nick says. 

“In this mess?” Louis stands by the shed, head tilted at the sky like a maths problem. “There’s too fucking many of them, mate.” 

Harry privately agrees. The densely freckled sky seems impossible to navigate for just a few arbitrary lines somebody made up a few thousand years ago. He tries to pull the shape from the sky like dot to dots, but fancies he can force it in anywhere. 

“There?” Liam traces the sky, and Nick whoops. 

“See the two right-hand stars of the Plough?” 

“No,” says Louis.  

“Yeah,” says Liam. 

“Follow them up, like, do a line.” Nick traces up. “They’re called the Pointers, I suppose ‘cos they point. Clever. Go right to the Pole star. Polaris. Real bright, see?” 

Liam’s whole face is a giant crinkle. “Yeah,” he says, all teeth. “That’s north, then, right?” 

“You got it. Then you can find them all, can’t you? Just connect the bits. Naughty Elephants Squirt Water,” Nick says, doing the points. 

“Think I’ll stick with a compass,” Louis says, giving the sky a last squint before turning back to the water basins. 

“D’you think people will still teach the kids Naughty Elephants?” Harry still hasn’t the faintest where in the sky the Plough ploughs, but he keeps searching. “Since they won’t know what one is, and all.” 

“Sure,” Nick says. “It’ll be like dragons, won’t it? Like mythical creatures. Daddy, what’s an elephant? Daddy, what’s a Mars Bar?”

“Well son,” Louis says in a pompous low voice, “When I was a boy —” 

“In the late Pleistocene —” 

 “One could trade small bits of paper for condensed sugar in little packets.” 

“Bits of paper?” Harry shakes his head, making his eyes go as big and round as they can stretch. “Surely not!” 

“Indeed it was true! Or circular tokens of metal.” Louis shapes his pointer finger and thumb to demonstrate. 

Liam laughs, shaking his head. “When you put it like that, it does sound pretty weird.” 

“Anything sounds weird if you talk it through.” Nick holds his feet out in front of him and picks bits of dirt off his boots. “Like, my job used to be to talk at a metal stick for three hours in the morning. That’s what I did for a job.” 

“I taught small children.” Louis drops an empty water bucket on the grass. “That makes plenty of sense.” 

“You taught small children _drama_ ,” Liam points out. 

Louis shrugs. “Drama has more longevity than radio, though. No offence.” 

“Offence _taken_ ,” Nick gasps, one hand to his heart. “Only it’s unfounded, so. Off-offence. You’re right.” 

Harry stands and wipes dirt from his knees. The sky is clear but they can leave the empties out in case of rain. So long as the paddling pool stays covered and no wayward fox or cat pokes a hole in the side, they should be sorted. 

“So, if that’s the Plough, where are the other ones?” 

“I think that one there’s Virgo, see the —”

“Hey, what’s that smell?” Louis squints around at the garden. “Do you smell that?” 

Harry sniffs obligingly. The cold cut of winter, and underneath —

“Something’s burning,” Nick says, voice flat. He stands, like his height’ll somehow give him visibility over the garden walls. 

“We have to see where,” Harry says, then considers and rejects the shed and the climbing trellis before rushing inside, past Perrie and Cara playing chess to stumble up the stairs in the dark until he makes it to the second floor. He trips over Cara’s camp bed and catches his elbow on the wall. 

“Up, up,” Nick says, behind him, ushering Harry to his feet. Louis and Liam wait on the stairs, Louis prodding Nick’s back in an effort to speed their procession. 

Fiona pokes her head out of the other bedroom, blinding them temporarily with her headlamp. She’s got her toolkit strapped to her hip, so she must have been working on the ceiling leaks. “What’s going on?” she asks, and Harry can only manage a gaping fish expression before the procession drives him into Zayn and Perrie’s room. Liam and Nick raise the window together. 

“East!” Liam says, grinning as he steps back from the window and lets Nick take his place. 

Fiona switches her headlamp off in the doorway and squints at the four of them. “What?” 

“The fire,” Liam explains. “It’s east.” 

Nick shakes his hair out, stepping aside to let Louis at the window. He looks out for a split second then pulls back. 

“Wind’s going the other way,” Louis says. “It’s fine.” 

There were fires last summer, after storms. Lightning would strike and whole streets went up in smoke. Harry pushes past Louis and Liam to look out. Hazy orange flames sway in the distance. The sky has been clear all day and night. Lightning starts fires. Lightning, and electricity, and people. Two down. 

Harry hopes some poor idiot knocked a candle into a curtain, or failed to stub out their cigarette. He doesn’t like the alternative. 

“You coming inside, Harold?” Nick rests a hand on Harry’s back. “Should I let know Pez and Zayn they’ve got a new window ornament?” 

“Yeah,” Harry says, trying to place the location of the flames.

“Window ornament, then? Like a mermaid at the front of the boat. Guiding us to safe passage.” 

Harry ducks back inside. The others must have left whilst he was looking. “Is there a name for that? Patron saint of pirates, or summat?” 

Nick shrugs. “I’ll look it up. So many books, so few bloody candles. C’mon, Harold. Let’s go sleep.” 

Harry follows Nick downstairs to their bedroom and sends a request to the patron saint of pirates: _don’t let the winds change_. 

 

 

Nutritious options dwindle as the weeks pass, bringing Chez Apocalypse into the new year with gifts of canker sores and brittle nails. Maybe it’s historically accurate: a winter famine, like their barns of crops have come up short. Everyone grows tired and irritable. Fires keep burning in the south, and in one wet morning their cellar floods with yellowing water. 

Funny, how easily the things that keep them alive can become their mortal enemies. One week Harry’s wishing desperately the ponds were closer in, and the next he’s sodden and miserable, carting buckets up the stairs and daydreaming of never seeing water again. Niall declares war on all liquid that day and Harry learns about twelve new swearwords. At one point Liam starts kicking the water, ordering it out of the house like an unhinged emperor trying to wage war with the sea. 

Harry dreams of the summer. He dreams of sunlight and taking his shirt off and Vitamin D. 

When their vitamins hit near-emergency levels, Harry, Nick and Louis take a slightly chancier scavenging mission in the hopes of getting back within the short span of winter daylight. Hackney doesn’t have the most welcoming population but the house needs supplies badly. They’ll risk it. Better quick and dicey than cycling out further and getting trapped in the dark. 

The Waitrose sits firmly adjacent to gang territory, which might be why still have stock, although half the shelves have been looted and the selection isn’t ideal. Louis keeps watch outside the entrance, clutching the rifle close to his chest. The last time they were in Hackney gang boys swiped all their supplies and left them with warning bruises for the trouble. Louis _hates_ taking chances.

Nick’s got a leopard-printed scarf wrapped around his nose and mouth to ward off the rotting smell from the produce and Harry has a matching one in green. Whenever they speak they sound entertainingly muffled, like cartoons. 

“My birthday’s tomorrow,” Harry mumbles at Nick, crouching to pick through the tuna. 

Nick reaches for some dented lentil soup around Harry’s head. “And how old _will_ you be, young Harold? I have absolutely no idea, actually. Is that odd? Oh, god, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. This is going to be excruciating. Go on, then. How young _are_ you, Styles?” 

“Twenty-one,” Harry says, and then laughs hysterically as Nick groans into the beets. 

The chilled foods aisles are expectedly nasty, the stench pungent and the area certain to be rodent-infested. He and Nick hurry past with their scarves stuffed nearly up their noses. Household is no good, mostly empty, but Harry spies a few unbroken bottles of wine nearby and lunges for them. 

“That’ll probably be vinegar,” Nick says archly, shuffling the tins around in his bag. “Can’t imagine how hot it was in here last summer.”

“You don’t know. It’s underground-ish, could be fine.” Harry shrugs and layers the bottles over his paltry acquisition of cans. “Besides, don’t act like you won’t drink it, Grimshaw. You nearly tried creme de menthe last week.” 

Nick makes a face. “In the name of science, obviously. And self-sacrifice. I don’t get nearly enough credit for that.” 

Nick had taken one whiff and booted his paltry stomach contents over the tiles of someone’s posh kitchen. Harry had nearly pissed himself laughing. 

“Ooh, look, grapes are on offer. Shall we? They come complete with their very own sentient civilisations!” 

Whatever used to live in those plastic packages has fallen prey to lagoons of verdant mould that press up through the air holes to continue their quest for power. The only indication that the fruit they murdered is in print. “Essential Waitross red seedless grapes,” the labels proclaim, “save 85p!” 

Harry rushes past them and lets out a whoop when he sees a cluster of multivitamins huddled in the back of dusty shelves in Dietary Supplements. Fuck the tuna. Nutrition _achieved_. 

Nick’s eyes crinkle up over his scarf mask. “Well, look at that. Perhaps I won’t reach my goal for a year of entirely liquid shit, after all.” 

“Sadly, don’t think this’ll change the consistency much.” Harry counts eleven bottles and checks the labels. “Although I think your internal organs will thank you anyway.” 

“A thank you note is the mark of a civilised society,” agrees Nick, tugging at the back of Harry’s scarf. “Maybe I’ll shit that out, too. Might be a bit pointy. A learning experience! Zayn could birth it. That’s what he went to school for, right?” 

Harry makes a face. “We talk way too much about our own shit.” 

“Don’t judge, Styles, it’s only natural when everyone’s waste production lingers in the scenic hellscape of your toilet, all right up and personal with your nose. That’s the way of a people without plumbing, you know. I bet it’s all they talked about in ye olden London. Whole theatrical dramas of defecation. Much Ado About Your Bowels.” 

“As You Like Shit,” Harry suggests.  

Nick snickers. “Romeo and a Nice Outdoor Lavatory.” 

“Taming of the Poo.” 

“Richard II… does a number two.” Nick’s face goes sulky. “Damn, that one worked better in my head.” 

Harry sniggers, kicking out at Nick’s trainer. “I win. You know what that means.” 

“That you’re a horrible child and I’ve never liked you?” 

The knot on Nick’s scarf is too tight to undo, so Harry settles for pulling it down. Nick squawks and fumbles it back up, retching theatrically at the influx of stench. “It _means_ , I get first bath later,” Harry correct. 

Nick fiddles with his scarf, pushing it down around his cheeks. “As if I would deign to dip in your bodily stew.” 

“Not what you said this morning.” Harry presses up against Nick’s back and runs his hands over his hips. 

“Hey! No groping in the smelly aisle, please.” 

“But they’re _all_ the smelly aisle.” 

“Exactly.” Nick ducks away and they have a brief dead arm competition that results in the toppling of a display of Fairy Liquid and a nearly turned ankle on Harry’s part. 

Harry shakes out his foot, rolling the ache from the joint. “So, hey, if that ever happens again and my ankle actually gets hurt, let’s tell Zayn we were doing something dignified, yeah?” 

“I’ll swear on my life we were fighting crime,” Nick says, turning into another aisle. “Theft, maybe? I hear that’s a terrible affliction amongst the youth.” 

Harry blinks. It’s all sugar in there, cake mixes and oils. Most of it has been ransacked already, or ruined. Granules crunch underfoot as Harry follows Nick up the aisle. 

“It’s your birthday tomorrow,” Nick explains, and kneels down to examine some packets. 

Harry reaches to twists his fingers into the hair at the base of Nick’s skull. 

“That should sort us,” Nick says, waving a box up at Harry. “Might poison us a bit but it’ll be fine. Chemicals, innit. They last forever.” 

Harry’s about to shove Nick in the shoulder when a massive clatter announces Louis’s arrival, running so fast he passes their aisle and then has to double back. “Shouldn’t have come,” he pants, “Fuck, they’re coming, c’mon, got to go.” He yanks Harry’s pack from his hands and slings it over his back, leading them out the front. Harry takes Nick’s in retaliation. He’s stronger than Nick is. As they run, Harry can feel Nick forcing the cake mix into the front pocket. Through the sour haze of adrenaline Harry questions his survival instincts.

“Fuck, hurry the fuck up,” Louis says, staggering onto his bicycle and waiting for Harry and Nick to catch up. 

A small crowd looms down the street: half bicyclists, half runners, and maybe a dozen big, barking dogs with slobbery muzzles. Harry fumbles his gears at the sight, stumbling to follow Louis as he darts between the building and the strip of overgrown greenery that divides the pavement in two.

“That’s our shop, arseholes!” roars a man over the rush of wind. “No looters!” 

Harry’s heart drums through his skull. Maybe two dozen people, and half as many dogs: more humans than Harry’s seen in months. The Hackney gang has grown since they saw them last, if they can spare so many people just to chase them. At best, they could take all their things. At worst… 

Louis veers left suddenly and Harry and Nick swerve to follow. Blood thunders in Harry’s ears. He feels sick but he keeps pedalling, glancing back every few seconds to make sure Nick hasn’t dropped behind. The barking doesn’t sound far away. Louis swerves again and Harry lets Nick turn first before following down a narrow residential row of terraces. Nothing good has happened here, Harry’d bet, not with the debris littering the road and the jacked cars driven partway into gardens. A few of the houses are charcoal black, burnt to jagged shreds. 

“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” Louis is chanting, legs pedalling furiously. Nick’s face has gone white and tense. Harry keeps going and wills himself not to look back or trip up on any rubbish or holes in the road. He curses aloud when his tyre wheels through a puddle of broken glass. _Don’t you dare go flat_ , Harry swears, clutching the handlebars. 

They turn right at the next cross-street and then Louis leads them down a pockmarked alley. The short stretch proves treacherous for Harry’s bike — _don’t you fucking dare_ , Harry swears over and over in his head — until they careen behind a community centre, its gold plaque nearly obscured by moss. Nick breaks the glass door with his foot and they stash their bicycles in a stairwell before climbing until they reach the roof.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Nick heaves, hands on his knees. “I’m going to be sick.” 

“Shh,” Louis chides, creeping to the side of the roof. He gets flat on his stomach and peers over the edge. Harry puts a soothing hand to Nick’s back for a moment, rubbing along the knobs of his spine, and then goes to join Louis. He hates not being able to see what’s going on. A moment later, Nick edges up on his other side. The three of them wait in a tense row, like watchful gargoyles. 

Through the alley ahead Harry can glimpse dogs and men running, all pumping legs and swinging fists. If it weren’t for the dogs or the weapons, they could almost be a marathon passing by. 

Finally they pass. Louis heaves a great, weighty gasp and rolls to his back, covering his face with his palms. “Shit. That was fucking close.” 

Nick laughs, a little hysterical. “Just like old times,” he says, struggling to sit up. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, shaking his head.  

Harry doesn’t move. He counts the marathon people in his head, running back through the memory. The Hackney gang must be twice, three times the size it was a few months ago. 

“Y’all right, Haz?” Louis nudges his toe into Harry’s side. He’s sitting up now, trading sips from the water bottle with Nick. “Water?” 

Harry nods and takes it, mind whirring. Once the reserves run out the gangs are going to head to wherever the pickings are decent, or start targeting anyone who has anything worth taking. If they set up on the Heath, plant crops or find chickens and cows, they’d have things worth taking. Water. Food. 

No gang has taken their part of Hampstead yet. There’s no big warehouses or clusters of supermarkets, so it’s not particularly valuable: just the Heath, some smaller shops and scads of posh houses. To the east, Hackney, where apparently the gang is going strong, and to the west, Wembley, where Harry’s heard some groups have made inroads. The south is all bad ground, what with the floods pushing everyone together in nasty skirmishes over the disappearing land.

North, then. They’ll need to go north. 

“We should stay up here for a bit,” Nick says. He’s watching over the lip of the roof, nervous fingers plucking at his jeans. “Let them tire themselves out and go back to their base.” 

Louis nods. “Few hours, probably.” He puts his forehead down on his knees, his leg hiding half of his pained expression. “Wish I had a mobile. Just like, just once. Even a really shitty one.” 

Harry pictures Liam back at the house, sat at the kitchen table going over roof repairs with Fiona. “He’ll be okay, Lou.” 

“Yeah, I know.” Louis gets to his feet and wipes his palms on his trousers. “Going for a wee.” He goes to the edge of the community centre roof and then climbs down the short jump to the next building. 

Nick reaches for Harry’s arm and tugs until he snorts and acquiesces to the wordless plea, moving so they’re sat tightly together. “Y’all right, love?” 

Harry nods, still thinking about maps. “You lived more south, before you found us. Right?” 

“Yeah,” Nick says, a little tense. 

“It as bad as I hear, down there?” 

Nick shrugs. “Not good.” 

“You said, before — just like old times, running from the gangs. Was that what you meant?” 

“Guess so.” Nick ducks his face so his nose is buried in Harry’s shoulder, letting out a sigh that seeps through to his skin. “Don’t wanna talk about it now.” 

“Is that how you got that scar?” Harry traces it without having to look, finding it in the centre of Nick’s forehead like braille.

“Nah, got it when my parents died fighting… Whatsit. What’s his name.” 

“Voldemort?” 

“That’s the one. I’m the Chosen Wizard, me. Gotta fight all the vampires and slay all the ghosts and ride on some dragons, probably.” 

Harry wonders if it’s too soon to joke about renaming the sickness Voldemort. Probably. “Does that make me Ginny Weasley?” 

“She the feisty redheaded one with the temper? Aw, I liked her. What a woman.” 

Louis comes scrambling up from the next roof. “Gross,” he says when he sees them cuddled up, as if he and Liam weren’t equally terrible and occasionally worse. 

Harry sticks his tongue out. Nick has, apparently, done the same, and Louis shakes his head at them both. “Just as bad as each other,” he says. 

“So, brilliant?” 

Louis ignores Nick and digs through one of their packs. “I live in fear for the day we run out of loo roll. Like, fucking terrified. That’s the moment.” He pulls out a bag of fruit pastilles and wrests it open. “Sugar?” 

Harry grabs a few pieces and plops them into his mouth. Sweetness swamps his tongue. Harry doesn’t care what sugar’s done to his teeth. It doesn’t grow bacteria and it makes his legs forget that they just pedalled for their lives: sugar is brilliant. 

“Mine is breaking my glasses.” Nick pushes the frames further up his nose. “I’m fucked if I do. One spare pair between me and a life of stumbling around knocking into tables, hoping I’m addressing the right person. Is that Harold? No, it’s Fifi. Oh wait, no, it’s a sofa. You’ll have to lead me about, Harry. My very own seeing eye dog.” 

“Ruff,” says Harry through a mouthful of pastille. 

“Worst of all, I wouldn’t even be able to see myself in the mirror. I’d forget my bone structure completely. You’d have to describe it to me. You’ll need to learn lots of adjectives for _flawless_.” 

“Lopsided’s one, right?” Louis shakes a few pastilles into Nick’s hand. “Warped? Deformed?” 

“Ah, it’s like I’m gazing into a mirror right now.” 

They linger on the rooftop until the sky seeps dusky purple, then fumble their way through the dark stairwell to their bicycles. 

No one says a word during the ride back, gripping their handlebars with white knuckles and pedalling furiously. Harry feels like he’s seeing the city anew. He sees burnt out terraces and debris, angry graffiti and rotting rubbish. _Keep out_ emblazoned in red on a brick house, _Hackney territory_. 

This isn’t a city. It’s a graveyard. Maybe a war zone. 

Harry falls back so Nick and Louis cycle ahead of him, Louis a furious shape in the front and Nick red-faced and sweaty just after. Nick’s got a bum foot and a bad knee and he _can_ run, but it doesn’t usually end well. Harry’s no great shakes either, medium fast and strong but prone to tripping on stairs and skinning his knees, or getting hypothermia and losing most of the feeling in his toes. 

 _He’ll never be safe here_ , Harry realises, with a cold sort of certainty. _I can’t protect him here_. 

Niall’s knee isn’t great either. Cara’s weaselly and quick but she’s skinny, not strong one-on-one. Gemma’s as capable as anyone but the gangs are everywhere, multiplying, gaining direction. None of them are particularly well-suited for the apocalypse, except for in whatever twist of their genetic codes it was that spared them in the first place. 

No one is safe here. 

Some of the debris and damage recedes when they enter their neighbourhood. They’ve never been much of a target before and no one’s bothered to burn them out. Yet. _Only a matter of time_ , Harry thinks, eying the stretch of terraces. They have to leave. They have to leave soon.  

Gemma runs out to greet them when they pull into the front garden and yanks Harry into the house before he can fully secure their bags. 

“What the fuck?” she asks, hugging him and smacking his head at the same time. 

“We got chased,” Harry explains. “Can I get my bag now?” 

“Someone else will handle it. You got _chased_?” 

“Lou was right. Hackney’s a no-zone. Gem, there were _twenty_ of them. Just chasing us, _twenty_.” 

Gemma tugs at the end of her braid. “Twenty? Are you _sure_? Sometimes a few of them can feel like more, with the adrenaline.” 

“It was twenty,” Louis says, heaving Harry’s bag onto the stairs. He pushes past them just in time for Liam, who sweeps him up so tightly they should maybe get Zayn on hand for any cracked bones. 

“See? Twenty.” Harry raises his eyebrows. “What was that you were saying about adrenaline?” 

Gemma pinches his ear and then goes to sprawl half on top of Niall in the lounge. “Haz says they had twenty people following,” she tells him. 

“I know, the door was open.” Niall tosses his magazine aside. “How many was it last time? Six?” 

Harry nods and goes to the window. Nick and Fiona are still out in the garden. It looks like Nick is getting a panic bollocking, what with Fiona’s emphatic finger shaking. “They’re getting bigger.” 

“Okay, so that’s Hackney out. We’ll just need to get creative.” 

Harry turns away from the window and sits, the sofa sucking him in past broken springs. “They’re all getting bigger, aren’t they? Everywhere. People are running out of supplies. Gangs are a solution to that.” 

Gemma makes a face. “A violent, sexual assaulty solution.” 

“Yeah. That kind. Hence the… not.” 

“Eloquent,” Nick says from the doorway. He dodges the coffee table and moves Harry’s legs so he can join the sofa sinking party. 

“I’m a very eloquent person,” Harry agrees, settling his legs around Nick’s lap. 

“So here’s a question I have, right.” Nick plucks at the hole in Harry’s jeans, tugging bits of fabric over his knee. “It’s the apocalypse, right?” 

“Post-apocalypse. Apocalypse already happened.” 

Nick ignores him. “So it’s the apocalypse, right, and we spend about twenty-five percent of our time running from angry people with sticks, and the rest of it trying to figure out what to do with our shit.” 

Niall squints at him. “Yeah, and?” 

“If it’s the apocalypse, shouldn’t we be dressing weirder? I mean, shouldn’t we all be in scraps of leather and fur caplets like it’s Burning Man? I feel like we’re not living up to this opportunity.” 

“I think the fur caplets come later,” Gemma muses. “A few generations have to pass before they think that’s a good idea.” 

“I dunno, I kinda like this idea.” Niall plucks at his jumper. “Rocking around in the skins of animals. Big mink coat like I’m in a music video, sounds sick.” 

“Sounds like you’re sleeping alone, is what that sounds like.” 

“You say that now, Gem, but you haven’t experienced me in one of those big Russian hats with the fur.” Niall demonstrates the shape over his head, like a vertically specific big fish little fish.  

Nick nods emphatically. “Maybe we should try themed weapons, too. Like, stab people with an elephant tusk. String up knives in our coats, y’know. Like porcupines, right, wear prickly bits on the outside.” 

“Dinosaur teeth from the National History Museum,” Harry suggests. 

Gemma laughs. “Swords out of the Tower of London.” 

Niall and Nick latch onto that idea immediately, chattering about chain-mail and the Crown Jewels. Harry delicately avoids reminding them that the Tower is enjoying a pretty hefty Venice canal situation. He settles back in the sofa, letting the fabric swallow him up. Through the door to the kitchen he can see Louis and Liam with their heads bent together, faces grave. He doubts they’re discussing the looting of priceless relics. 

 

 

At half ten the next morning — whenever that is; without a sundial or an iPhone clock, he can only make an educated guess — Harry turns twenty-one. He feels pretty much the same as he did when he was twenty, and about a decade and a half older than when he was nineteen. Nineteen feels about as far away as Antarctica, or Kent. Nineteen might as well be Jupiter. Far, but also a gas giant.  

In the afternoon Nick, Gemma and Harry make a cake from powdered milk and the old cake mix. Cake might be a generous descriptor. Balanced precariously on the camp stove, their frankencake overbakes on one side and underbakes on the other. If its appearance weren’t enough of an affront, frankencake is also devoid of so many of the prescribed ingredients it’s mostly just mix and water. 

“So much for the Great British Bake-Off,” Gemma sighs. 

“Don’t be hasty, now, this could be the actual _only cake left in all of Great Britain_ , Gemma Styles.” Nick turns the plate of frankencake, poking at the side. “Winning by default still counts as winning!”  

“Poor little cake.” Harry tilts his head. Frankencake still looks weird and lopsided from that angle. “It’s trying really hard to be a cake.” Next time they try baking, Harry wants to have eggs —“Binding ingredient!” Nick had wailed, “We forgot the binding ingredient!” — and maybe butter, if they’re lucky. 

Zayn comes in from the back garden, spilling cold air through the door. He stares at them, frozen. “Is that… What _is_ that?”  

“It’s a _birthday cake_ , Zayn Malik,” Nick says staunchly. “Now get inside and take Harold to the lounge, we’re going to do a nice presentation.” 

“Okay, but medically speaking, I wouldn’t recommend eating that.” Zayn takes Harry by the elbow and leads him into the other room. 

“Food poisoning is temporary!” Nick calls after him. 

“Not if you die first!” says Zayn. 

“No fighting on my birthday,” says Harry. “Unless it’s over me, in which case, fight on my birthday.” 

“Nice, Haz,” says Perrie, rolling her eyes. 

“Yes, nice Haz. I’m very nice. It’s my birthday!” 

“So you’ve said, six or seven times,” says Cara. She passes Harry a crown made from green paper. “I was going to get glitter, but I forgot.” 

Harry feels lit up from the inside. “This is _brilliant_ ,” he says, then jams the creation over his head. The width is a little small but he’s making it work. “Birthday crown. Yay!” 

Once the rest of their housemates trickle in, Gemma carefully carries the frankencake, ablaze with tiny candles, through the door. Everyone sings Happy Birthday. If this were a film about the apocalypse, they wouldn’t be allowed to sing Happy Birthday, which might have proven beneficial to Nick maintaining any dignity. Nick, by far the worst singer in the house, sings the loudest, clapping a nonsensical beat along to his off-key warble. 

Harry doesn’t even pretend not to find that heart-meltingly endearing. 

He blows out all twenty-one candles in one heaving burst, wishing for nonsensical things like a faster way to boil water for tea or an electrical generator or a new coat. 

Nick crows over the cake, prodding Liam to get him to cut faster and Harry makes another wish, a little belatedly. 

Frankencake, as well as not looking much like a cake, also doesn’t taste much like a cake. Harry makes a royal decree that anyone who didn’t help make frankencake doesn’t get to talk shit about frankencake, though, and they’re all hungry enough to eat every dusty bite. Even Zayn has his fill, for all his big talk about medically speaking.  

After cake Harry plays bridge for a few rounds and then bows out when the game switches over to cribbage. He means to read, but winds up dozing off on Nick’s lap, all warm and full and happy. 

Firelight flickers over Harry’s eyelids and he turns his face further into Nick’s thigh. The scribble of Nick’s pen burrows into his ear alongside the slaps from the game across the room. 

“You’re always writing in that,” Harry mumbles. He turns over so he can look up at Nick’s face. “Hey, I can see all the way up your nose.” 

“Beautiful view?” Nick frames his nostrils with his free hand. “Right into my brain? I’ve got a lovely brain, haven’t I?” 

“Mm-hm.” Harry shifts again, looking over at where Nick braces his notebook along the arm of the sofa. “What do you write about?” 

“Things I learn about in books, I guess.” Nick shrugs one shoulder and starts to flip through the ink-dense pages. His elbow bumps up under Harry’s chin like a helmet strap. “Other stuff. Don’t know, really. Bit odd, I guess. Want to see it?” 

Harry nods and reaches up. The notebook is small, maybe a handspan across, bound in off-red leather and warped with water and use. Nick’s scrawl inches across the pages, filling line after line with black ink. _Balloons (for holidays). Destiny’s Child (Beyoncé, Kelly Rowland, Michelle)._ The outline of a clock, hours marked in careful print. Harry turns the page. A doodle of a birthday cake. _Celebrate birthdays: make a cake (or as close as you can). Put one candle for each year of the birthday person’s age. They should make a wish, then blow out the candles._ The next page holds a doodle of the stars, the Plough drawn over in thick line. _The Plough is part of a bigger constellation called Ursa something. Major or Minor, can’t remember which. It means bear. Do you know what a bear is? I’d draw you one but I’m not very good at it. We don’t have bears here anymore, but we used to._

“Who do you write to?” Harry pitches his voice low. He feels like this is private, like a diary, almost, not just a waterlogged little book Nick keeps in his back pocket.

“I don’t know.” Nick pushes hair back from Harry’s forehead. “My godson, I think. That’s who I started writing it for, but he…” Nick bites his lip, chin tense. 

“He didn’t make it?” 

Nick hums a low agreement and starts up stroking Harry’s forehead again. “So now just… Anybody? Whoever’s next, I guess. Whoever’s left. It’s stupid, but I like doing it.” 

The next page has a wobbly drawing of a creature with a long trunk and big ears. _Elephant_ , it says underneath. _They have long memories and mourn their dead. They’re smarter than most people on telly (I’ll explain telly later)._

“I can’t think of anything less stupid in the world.” Harry traces the line of the elephant trunk. “Well. Maybe spray-on hair.” 

“Don’t mock that which you do not yet understand,” Nick opines, patting Harry’s head. “Someday you too might feel the siren song of head paint.” 

“Why do you think I’m collecting hats?” Harry shifts so that his elbow isn’t digging into his side. “Gotta ward off the need.” 

“Farmer Harry,” Nick says fondly. He picks his book up again and uses the spine to resettle his glasses. “Weird farmer hats.” 

“Yep,” Harry agrees, and shuts his eyes again. The fire crackles. Across the room, Louis and Cara bicker about points, and Liam asks if anyone wants tea. He’s another year older. If he can ignore all the niggling warnings that have been swarming through his mind for months, he’ll be able to sleep easy.  

 

 

“Twenty-one,” Nick says, as they clean their teeth. They don’t want to waste the water so they don’t rinse their mouths of toothpaste, and mint crusts the inside of Harry’s tongue even when they put their toothbrushes away. It’s a little weird, but better than rotten molars. Puppy yips at their feet, twining around Harry’s legs like she’d like him to trip so that she can lick his face properly and get petted. Harry is not unfamiliar with that feeling. 

“I can legally drink in America,” Harry says, shimmying out of his jeans. 

“How would you get to America?” Nick’s pulling his shirt over his head. His back is covered in freckles, thickest along his shoulder-blades, and there’s so much skin Harry can’t quite get his lungs to work until Nick pulls a big t-shirt over his head and then the freckles are gone. 

“Swim.” 

Nick snorts. “Of course.” He crawls up into the bed — the room is so narrow they can’t actually get at the bed from the sides — and makes a nest of the covers, snapping his fingers until Puppy vaults up and joins him. “What?” 

Harry realises that he has been staring. He likes it, is all, Nick in their bed. His hair falls soft and curly over his forehead, and there’s a gentle, almost startled look in his eyes and Harry had made this wish, before. “You know what I wished for? On the cake, I mean?” 

“World peace?” asks Nick, blinking in his bemused way. “A guarantee we won’t run out of loo roll?” 

Harry shakes his head and crawls up the bed towards Nick. “No,” he says. 

“What, then?” Nick’s eyes look very big. “What’s that look for?” 

Harry folds into Nick and pulls him down to the bed, looping all their limbs. “Nothing. I’m just glad you’re here.” 

Nick’s nose rests lightly in Harry’s hair. Under his cheek, Harry can feel the hummingbird thrum of his fast heart. “I’m glad I’m here too,” Nick whispers, voice stripped bare as winter trees. 

 

 

Fiona puts a ban on Nick and Harry foraging together after an ill-conceived trolly race nearly crushes them both under a wall of biscuits. Harry maintains that the avalanche could have happened to anyone, but he can’t deny that he does more looting and less fellatio when out with the others. 

Scavenging, as their full-time occupation, becomes a personal art form. Everyone does it a little differently. Louis moves fast. He makes snap decisions — this house is worth it, this house is a waste of time — leaves kitchens in wrecks and departs before looking in the bedrooms. Perrie and Louis can never forage together because Perrie moves methodically through every room, looking under beds and checking every cupboard. It’s how she finds Harry a pair of wellies in his exact size, but she does spend an entire day on one house. 

Zayn likes to choose targets. He’s methodical and precise, all clean lines and safety standards. When he picks locks Harry can see the doctor he would have been in another world, so careful of the flimsy lives in his hands. 

Niall has instinct. He’ll walk into a block of flats and point to a gold-plated number. “That one,” he’ll say, and sure enough they’ll unearth five sealed packets of AA batteries in a cupboard. 

Cara prefers style. She chooses houses she wants to see the insides of: stone Georgian manors and warehouses filled with converted lofts and funny little cottages set back from the road. When Harry spots the curved glass of a modernist mansion over the hill, he knows immediately Cara will want it. 

He awards himself one imaginary point when Cara speeds ahead, swerving into the front garden of the modernist house. Harry hides his bike in a cluster of topiaries before going to join her. 

“I sort of hate the idea of breaking the door,” Cara says, hands on her hips. She cranes her head back to take in the rows of windows. The house is a big white cylinder, like a wedding cake, and nearly all the walls are glass. 

Harry hopes there are no bodies. This looks like the sort of house where there would be bodies. All clean and beautiful, then corpses in the four poster bed. He shakes the thought off, like water from a dog’s back. 

“Let’s look around,” Harry says, “Maybe there’s a spare key.” They circle the walls, trampling the overgrown garden. One of the side doors gives when he tries it, swinging open easy. 

Inside, Greek statues flank a mirrored corridor that gives way ahead to an expanse of immaculate white and sheer walls of windows, sun pouring through in floods. 

The only word Harry can come up with is, “Wow.” 

“Total sixties,” Cara marvels, bounding ahead to sprawl across a white leather sofa. “Groovy, baby.” 

According to an embossed letterhead on a side table, the people who lived here were called the Gilberts. Harry writes his name in the dust on the wet bar, then swipes their expensive vodka. This doesn’t look like a real house. It’s more of a film set: light and sparse, every shag rug angled for the camera. 

In the master bedroom Cara plucks a ridged silver tube of lipstick from a stand and slicks pink over her mouth. 

“Darling,” Cara drawls, posh vowels garbled like she’s chewing marbles, “We have to get ready. The party’s in an hour.” She watches Harry, blue eyes wide in the mirror. 

Harry wonders who Cara is looking at. Her husband, home late from his job in the City? Or maybe her brother, lazy on his holidays from Cambridge, haughtily overfed with first-year philosophy. Or her ne’er-do-well son, still smelling of the weed he tries to hide from her, lighting up in the bathroom at night. Maybe she knows where he hides it. Maybe she skims from the top when he’s at college. 

“But what should I wear?” Harry opens the wardrobe. A backwash of dust billows out, temporarily obscuring the shelves. A few moths flutter irritably from their feast of neatly folded cashmere jumpers. Harry coughs and fumbles for his inhaler. 

“The dress code is black tie, Hugo, I’m sure I told you.” Cara reaches for a pair of black stilettos by the window and tries them on. They’re too small. She flattens the back with her heels and stands on them anyway. “But it doesn’t matter. Father is in the country again.” 

“He’s always in the country,” says Harry, imagining a portly man with grey hair and a tweed jacket. Hugo’s father. Hugo Senior, maybe. He runs his fingers over the rows of blazers. They’re all bespoke, fit to a body that no longer exists. 

“Ever since…” Cara looks away, hand to her heart. “ _The accident_.” 

Harry whirls round, black tie clutched in his fist. “Arabella. We never speak of… _The accident_.” 

Cara lets out a strangled sound of protest, toppling back over the bed. “But why, Hugo? Why must we never speak of _the accident_?” 

“ _You know why_.” Harry tangles the tie around his neck and looks down at the ends. He can’t remember how the knot goes. 

Cara sprawls out over the duvet like a fainting maiden in a story. “Because of… _society_.” 

 _Society_. Marble floors and shined shoes, ballrooms filled with bodies and the low buzz of gossip. A million unspoken rules in the way you knot your tie or hold a fork. Hugo and Arabella sitting with their backs straight at a long table, Hugo Senior at the helm. Of course they’d both enter the professions, of course they’d attend Oxbridge, of course they’d place the wine glass on the right hand side of their place setting and never wonder _why not the left?_  

“Yes, Arabella. Because of society.” Harry sneers, imagining Hugo’s disdainful embrace of the word. He’d hate it and love it, never sure if he lives in a sweeping field or a laboratory maze with scientists standing overhead, ushering him towards the cheese. “We cannot escape society.” Harry throws the tie aside, Hugo’s petulant pout. 

Cara tumbles off the bed and walks to the window, left foot then right with the slight crossover of a runway model. “Next year, I’m moving to Morocco,” she tells him, holding her hand up like she’s smoking a cigarette. She blows invisible smoke out into the room. Surely Hugo Senior would disapprove. 

“I’ve never been to Morocco,” Harry admits, and he’s not Hugo. Hugo has definitely been to Morocco. Hugo sat in a hotel suite with his nanny when he was five and threw room service strawberries over an eggshell blue carpet; Hugo has a favourite restaurant and a preferred villa in Marrakech. 

“Me neither,” Cara says, dropping her invisible cigarette. 

They look out the glass window wall. The bare winter trees hide nothing and there are no curtains. The Gilberts — or Hugo and Arabella — would have stood out like figurines in a dollhouse, every room lit up at night. Maybe they liked that. Maybe they wanted everyone to see how they set the table. 

“We should go,” Harry says, and Cara nods. 

On their way out, Cara takes the lipstick. 

 

 

Perrie tells him that February has given way to March, but from the weather Harry would have no real idea. The past few months have melded together, the same chilly damp and days of temperate gloom. Occasionally a few bright day will light the garden like an Impressionist painting in swirls of green and gold and deceive them into thinking it’s warm. 

Harry starts learning the guitar. He’s not very good, but Niall’s successfully got him to remember three entire chords so he feels pretty accomplished. They write weird little songs about city rats and dust bunnies, and Zayn and Perrie pitch in on harmonies. Harry thinks they sound pretty good, and the songs always make Nick laugh so hard he has to lie down. Nick’s favourite tune so far is called “Puppy Did a Poo in the Hallway (Why)”. He sings bits of it back to them for hours, but only the same two lines, like a broken music box. 

“Shh,” Harry says, as Nick chants lyrics into his ear at the start of the house meeting. “We’re meant to be serious right now, Grimshaw.” 

“— And a poo the size of a —” 

Harry smacks him in the face with a throw pillow. 

“Would you two please?” Gemma shakes her head at them. “Like primary school kids, I swear to god.” 

“Miss, Harry’s suffocating me, Miss!” Nick waves his hands about from under the pillow. 

Harry laughs, digging his feet into Nick’s thigh. “He’s lying, Miss, I didn’t!”

“Right, what do we need this week?” Fiona rolls her eyes and pulls her notebook into her lap. She stares up at them expectant. 

Nick waves his hands a bit more like he’s drowning in sofa, then gives in and sits up. “A sense of humour and good fun?” he suggests. 

“That’s enough from you, Nicholas,” Fiona tells him, teetering between laughter and parental disappointment. “Anyone else?” 

“We’re okay on food.” Perrie shrugs. “On track, anyway. Through the rest of the month. Could use more, obviously, and something that wasn’t rice and beans would be nice, but we’ll be able to manage.” 

“Loo roll,” Niall says glumly, and everyone nods. 

“Batteries.” Gemma waves her blue torch, dead now for weeks. “Might be time for literal torches, I guess, but I can’t believe there are no more batteries in all of London.” 

“It’s like we’re kings of England,” Nick says, holding an imaginary stick aloft. “Traipsing about in the dark. Like the Lion in Winter. Lions in Winter? Christmas Lions? That film where everyone runs around a lot in a castle and hides behind draperies.” 

“The Lion in Winter! I fucking love Katharine Hepburn.” Cara twists her voice all weird, almost like she’s American but not quite. “We all have knives, of course we have knives, it’s 1138 and we’re barbarians! For the love of god, can’t we love one another just a little? We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.” 

Nick quirks his head to the side. “I don’t remember that part.” 

“Maybe because you fall asleep in every movie, Grim,” sighs Fiona, crossing something out in her notebook. “Well. Fell. Fall?” 

“Oh, right. Don’t suppose I’ll ever see the end, even now that my attention span has grown by leaps and bounds. You know, I don’t think I get enough credit for my personal growth and development.” 

“I’ll show you personal growth,” Harry murmurs, and then takes Nick’s earlobe into his mouth just to hear him squawk. 

“It was a play, too, I think,” Louis says. “I think I read it in university.”

“We should try to find a copy,” Harry says, mostly into Nick’s earlobe.  

Zayn looks around at Harry fellating Nick’s ear and Cara and Louis getting excited about old films. Niall’s flipping through a comic book, Liam peering over his shoulder. “Weren’t we meant to be having a meeting? Wasn’t that the goal?” 

“Pfft, _goals_.” 

“Yeah, so, we’re going to need more inhalers.” Zayn looks pointedly in Nick’s direction.

“No, we don’t, it’s fine,” Nick huffs. He waves his hands like he’s fending off blows, and Harry turns to stare at him, because _what_. 

“It’s incredibly _not_ fine, actually.” Zayn makes a face at Nick. He’s really perfected the look of incredulity Harry associates with times he falls over in empty rooms or tries to reach through doorways full of broken glass and Zayn genuinely cannot process the experience of being his friend. Harry likes to take it as a compliment on his uniqueness. “We have enough for Harry, but Grimmy’s asthmatic, too.” 

Harry spins to look at Nick. “Sorry, you’re _what_ now?” 

Nick blinks at him nervously, fiddling with his glasses. “I’m… A bit, yeah. It’s fine, though. Just need to use my puff-puff a little sometimes. No big deal.” 

“Oh how _stupid_ , I can’t believe I forgot,” Fiona mutters, scribbling onto the paper. “We have to start collecting those right away; we’ll need loads, just in case. No natural replacement, is there?” 

Zayn shakes his head. “Fresh air helps, but inhaler’s are it for the city. Lucky they’re over the counter these days. Shouldn’t be too impossible to find.” 

Nick cleans his glasses with a corner of his shirt, avoiding all eyes. 

“I cannot believe you,” Harry hisses, sickly panic swamping his vision at the thought of Nick keeling over somewhere unhelpful, the Heath, or in a dusty room of a raid house. 

“It’s… I’ve got an inhaler,” Nick tells him quietly. He keeps cleaning his glasses, polishing imaginary specks from the lens. Around them, their housemates have helpfully begun to discuss the leaky roof and aren’t paying them any mind. “It’s not like I’ve been going without. It’s okay.” 

“ _Okay_? Don’t you have like… You’ve got the bad asthma, right? Since you were a kid? Am I making that up?” 

Nick wrinkles his nose to the side and keeps polishing, which is as much of a confirmation as Harry needs. 

“Inhalers don’t last forever. They expire. You use them up, Grim.” 

“I know that, obviously. I just…” He tilts his glasses towards the fire, then goes back to scrubbing them. “You don’t have to make a fuss, Harold. I figured I’d pick another one up, when I needed it.” 

Harry could hit him. He does hit him, just a little bit, on the shoulder. “What, at your local Asda? _Nick_.” 

Nick ducks his face. “Yeah. Sorry.” 

“For fuck’s sake,” Harry mutters, shaking his head. His own asthma’s been enough of a bloody problem in the increasingly grimey buildings they loot. Harry only has the dust mite allergy kind, site specific. He hadn’t had any trouble in Cheshire, but London’s another story. If Nick doesn’t realise that he needs to collect inhalers like somebody off that hoarders show, he’s completely deluded. 

“We can be puff-puff buddies,” Nick attempts, jostling Harry’s side. “It’ll be fun, like, people will wonder how we got this far. They’ll put us in a museum of wonders: two idiots survived the end of days! Next, the four-headed aquatic rat!” 

Harry holds onto his frown. Nick is not allowed to disrupt Harry’s strop right now. 

Cara tosses a throw pillow their way, elbow swinging with the savage throw of a former rounders champion. 

“ _What_?” snaps Harry, catching it in his lap. 

“We were _trying_ to discuss the leaky ceiling, Harold,” she informs him. "Not to interrupt your little domestic just then, and all.” 

Harry takes a deep breath and tries to focus on ceilings. 

“Yet more _water_ ,” Niall mutters darkly. “I’m moving to Majorca. There’s a leak right over our _bed_.” 

Gemma nods. “I’m with you. Majorca or bust.” 

Nick keeps nudging Harry’s knee like a Puppy does when she’s trying to get a cuddle. Harry wishes it took longer than three minutes for him to give in, settling their legs back together in an octopus tangle. 

“Sorry,” Nick says, soft into Harry’s ear. “I really just… Didn’t think about it. Like, I figured I could just grab another when I needed it. Sorry.” 

Harry takes Nick’s hand in his and runs his fingers along the bones. “It’s okay,” he says, and settles back as the meeting goes on. Grab another when he _needed_ it. 

“I’m not an expert, but I’ve done loads of DIY and a few years ago we replaced the ceiling of our house.” Fiona shrugs. “I’m pretty sure if we had the tools I could help figure it out properly, instead of just patching it all the time.” 

Nods bob around the room, like a circle of wobbly-headed dolls. 

Harry shifts, leaning towards the centre of the room. “Have we given any thought to… You know, getting out of the city?” He doesn’t see the point of repairing something they should have left yesterday. If the house is dead, they should move on. Only triage that which can be saved. They need to be moving forward, not stalling on ceiling leaks. 

Nick blinks at him, and Harry does his best to ignore the slightly stricken expression in his eyes. 

“We’ve talked about it before,” Harry continues, looking straight ahead, “Months ago, but we said it wasn’t the right time. I think it’s the right time. We need to set up while we still have supplies and food, and it’s… What, March? It’s March still, right? That would be a good time to start, I think. We’d want to move before summer, so we could plant in advance.” 

Everyone stares at him for a minute. The fire lights up corners of their faces like burning scraps of paper, eyes flickering in the gleam. 

“Any thought to Majorca?” jokes Niall, breaking the stillness. 

“Fresh air is good for asthma, if that’s something we’re worrying about,” Zayn admits. His hands twist uncomfortably in his lap. “But I think it’s maybe premature. We have supplies here. We have a system. We shouldn’t go yet.” 

“I want to go,” Cara says immediately. The firelight sends her cheekbones into sharp relief, like staves on a boat. “I’d go tomorrow. We should start scouting now.” 

“Terraces aren’t exactly reliable, and the roof is kind of shit,” Fiona admits. “But I don’t think we’re ready to be that far from supplies.” 

“The gangs are getting stronger,” Louis points out. “Bigger. They have more people to feed, and they’re hungry. Last I heard, Hackney territory goes as far east as the A1.” 

Liam nods, pulling at his beard. “It’s not just a couple dozen desperate people rooting around in bins anymore. They’re organised. I met this couple last week, said the Camden Gang is three hundred strong.” 

A collective breath seeps through the room. Three _hundred_. Harry can’t remember what three hundred people even looks like. The summer before everything happened, Harry had gone to Glastonbury with a few of his mates from uni. That had been about a hundred thousand people camping in the mud. There are probably only just that many people left in all of London.

“They won’t come here. We don’t make sense as a target.” Gemma shakes her head so her tie dye hair spins out. “We don’t have anything worth taking, and we’re such a small group…” 

“We’re close to water. Everyone knows the Heath has water.” 

“So does the Thames, so do the canals. That’s not a strong enough draw. They’ll stay close to warehouses. We don’t have many.” 

Harry leans forward. “The warehouses will only last so long. They’ll have to keep looking. If we want to set up long-term —” 

The meeting goes around in dizzy swirling circles. Arguments stack up and then topple away like a big, nasty game of Jenga. By the time Fiona says they should leave it, and revisit the topic in a fortnight or two, Harry’s cross and frustrated. 

Perrie ashes the fire and everyone stumbles to bed in the dark. Nick goes ahead of Harry and leaves the bathroom before Harry’s even upstairs, disappearing into their bedroom without a word. Harry stills on the steps, stalling Zayn behind him. 

“What’s he —” Harry swallows, watching the door shut. 

Zayn chews on his lip. “Dunno. He didn’t seem too happy about the leaving the city thing, did he?” 

“No.” A cold twist of dread settles in the pit of his gut. Harry hates fighting. He _hates_ it, he hates it _so_ much, but there are some things worth fighting for and Harry will not back down on this. Not when it’s this important. “We need to, though. Long-term, we don’t have a choice.” 

“I know.” Zayn sighs, folding his arms tight over his chest. He leans in the doorway whilst Harry portions off a pinky nail’s worth of toothpaste. “It’s… hard to imagine, Haz. Leaving.” 

“Don’t see why,” Harry mumbles through his mouthful of stale mint and toothbrush. Toothbrushes, that’s something else they should stock up on.  They can’t replace teeth. Maybe they should try to find some books on dentistry, before they go. 

“Well, you wouldn’t.” 

“What’s that mean, then?” Harry raises an eyebrow at Zayn’s shadowed profile, spare and beautiful and slightly infuriating in the moonlight. 

Zayn shrugs. “Just that you don’t mind this, do you? The moving about. Pez doesn’t either. I do, though. ’Spect Nick does, as well.” 

Harry shakes his head and spits foam into the sink. “It’s not about _minding_ it or _liking_ it. It’s… If we want to survive, this is what we have to do. We _have_ to.” 

“Dunno.” Zayn’s chewing on a fingernail, looking at something past Harry. “You ever worked land? Properly, I mean? I’ve never even… dug anything. I think we might be better off scavenging, Haz. We could starve out there.” 

“Scavenging won’t last forever.” Harry planted gardens with his mum when he was younger, grew some veg, lines of flowers. He liked patting the dirt down over little mounds and seeing tufts of green sprout up months later, bright and proud through the soil. He’s not sure how to plant enough to feed everybody, but they’ll have to learn. “We could starve here, too.” 

Zayn shrugs again. “Just… It’s not so cut and dry, is it?” 

“It _is,_ though,” Harry says, stalwart, because there’s no way around it, and how can Zayn not see that? Zayn’s clever. Zayn should know that even if they survive this, how long can they keep the gangs from raiding their stores when supplies get harder to find? How long can they live on multivitamins and tinned soup? Zayn knows the names for the vitamin deficiencies, the words for swelling and vision loss and endless diarrhoea. And even if _they_ can manage — what if Zayn and Perrie have a kid someday? Or Gemma? What will happen to them? 

“Okay, Haz.” Zayn’s humouring him. It makes Harry a little bit want to kick Zayn’s skinny calves. He can’t kick Zayn, though, because Zayn is one of the best and kindest people he knows. It’d be like kicking a benevolent baby owl. He settles for a huff and then pushes past him to the corridor. 

In their bedroom Nick is curled on his side, the blankets twisted up to reveal the comma of his body. Only Puppy greets Harry when he comes in, and he scoops her up for kisses. He’s feeling extremely unappreciated. 

“What?” Harry asks, petulant and about a half second away from stamping his foot like he’s six and his mum put him on the naughty step.

“Nothing,” Nick mumbles, and Harry does stamp his foot then, just a little bit. He’s not proud of it. He’s tired and _still_ hungry and he thought Zayn and Nick would have his back on this and they haven’t done. He _needs_ them to have his back. He _needs_ it. 

“Obviously it’s not nothing,” Harry says, hating himself a little for how stroppy he sounds. He puts Puppy down on the bed and she yips, begging to be pet again. “Don’t — fuck’s sake, Grim. Obviously it’s not nothing.” 

There’s a long silence during which Harry fumes and Nick breathes quietly. Harry’s head aches under the roaring emptiness of eight point three million mouldering bedrooms, claustrophobic and asthmatic. Their house sits amidst six hundred square miles of decaying memorial stones. He doesn’t understand how Nick can’t see that. Surely Nick feels the dust clogging his lungs with every breath. 

“I don’t want to leave London,” Nick says eventually, heavy and final like a signature at the end of a page. 

Well, if all else fails, Harry can just tear out his own hair and then he won’t have to worry about shampoo anymore. “Why _not_?” 

“ _Because_ ,” Nick snaps, sitting up and scowling at Harry, blankets coming off him like waves. “Because this is my _home_ , Harry. London is _home_ , and when things go back to normal I want to be _here._ I want to be _at home_. I don’t want to be starving to death out in the country because none of us here know how to grow a fucking _turnip_ , let alone enough food to sustain all of us. _Jesus_ Christ, Haz, I don’t have that kind of death wish.” 

“ _Staying here is a death wish_ ,” Harry hisses, fists balling at his sides. Puppy whines, looking between Harry and Nick, her lost expression like a recent child of divorce. Part of Harry feels guilty for this fight, but more of him wants to _shake Nick until his teeth rattle_ because Harry is trying to save his life, why can’t Nick _see_ that? Why can’t they all see that? Aren’t they all choking on the ashes?

Nick fists the blankets, sending folds like veins across the surface. “You don’t _know_ that. You don’t know for sure.” 

“Oh, I don’t know for sure? Really?” Harry unclenches his hands to tick the reasons off on his fingers. “The gangs get closer to us every day. Two hundred, three hundred, bigger and stronger and _meaner._ Supplies are harder to come by. Multivitamins only last so long, and what happens when we can’t find them anymore? Scurvy, that’s what. Other things besides. Shitting out all the water we can’t afford to lose. _We will die here_. Not tomorrow, not in a few months, but eventually, we will _fucking start to die off_ and we’ll be thinking, we should’ve learned how to grow summat, huh? But it’ll be _too late;_ we’ll be too weak to travel and too weak to learn and too weak to work the land and _then_ , Nicholas, _that_ will be our goddamn death wish.” 

“That’s just _guesswork_ ,” Nick says, eyes wild with a fire Harry can’t place. “We’ll — for all we know, the government will be back up and running in a few months and that’d be _here,_ wouldn’t it, they’d come back to London and none of that… None of that will _matter_.” 

“It’s _not_ going to go back to normal!” Harry’s shouting now, hoarse voice startling Puppy to the other end of the bed. He should quiet down before their housemates come in to check on them but he can’t seem to modulate his volume at all. 

“You don’t _know that_ ,” Nick repeats, loud as Harry now, hands fisting in the duvet. “How can you know that? You can’t see the future! You don’t have magical powers! If you’d had magical powers, I’d have hoped you’d have let us know by now! Maybe shed a little light on the situation!” 

“For fuck’s _sake_ , Nick, I don’t know how else to tell you — it’s _not_ going to get back to normal! It’s just not! I don’t…” 

Harry waves at their window. Beyond the garden the moon glistens over lifeless terraces: their walls bloated with rain, foundations sinking into the soil, all crumbling stairs and festering kitchens. Countless duplicate rows queue across London, home only to rats and foxes, waiting for the earth or the river to swallow them up. A dead city rots like a dead tooth. 

“Listen, nearly _everyone_ ’s gone. It’s _just us_ here! Us, and some massive fucking vicious gangs and a few other stragglers scraping by on beans and powdered milk, for _fuck_ ’s sake!” He swallows, throat clogging. “We’re what’s left, Nick. We’re all that’s left.” 

Nick looks unspeakably furious for a burning moment and then he tips over, burying his face in his long hands. “I don’t want to leave home,” he whispers. 

Harry’s heart twists into a pretzel knot. All the fight drains from him at once. 

“I know,” Harry says, and climbs over the bed to get his arms around Nick’s bent back. “I don’t — I get that, but we have each other, don’t we? That’s what home really is.” 

Nick doesn’t say anything, but when Harry burrows into his chest he lifts his arms to make the passage easier. They breathe together, long wheezy exhales. Asthma buddies. 

“We need to start over,” Harry whispers. “We have to.”

Nick finds Harry’s hand in the blankets, fingers soft over his skin. Harry lies awake for a long time. 

 

 

For the first time in a long while, Harry dreams of his mother. He dreams he finds her long brown hair tangled in his shower drain, clinging to his jumper, scattered over his pillow. His mum used to always have hairgrips in her pockets — _you get that wild hair from someone, baby, and it sure wasn’t your dad_ — and they’d spill out into every corner of the house. She used to say that they migrated: sleek tribes of hairpins traversing the length and breadth of Holmes Chapel. Even when Harry moved to London he’d find the little metal pins in the seams of his clothes or gathering in the pit of his weekender bag. 

He wakes up smelling pancakes, but it’s porridge again. 

Louis, Cara and Liam agree they need to leave the city, and the next morning the four of them ransack the walls, taking the satellite maps of London out of their frames and poring over them in the comparative privacy of Liam and Louis’s room. 

“Here,” Cara says, pointing to a stretch of green north of London. “It’s a nature reserve. I think I’ve been there — like, I remember as a kid going to visit a children’s farm near it with my parents.” 

Louis nods and circles the stretch with a yellow highlighter. “That’s a river, right there. Or a stream, maybe? Could help.” 

“Another nature reserve here,” Harry adds, pointing to another green space to the west of the one Cara identified. “Look how big the river is.” 

“That’s a Thames tributary,” says Liam, and everyone blinks at him. “What?” He scowls. “I know things.” 

“Of course you do, babe,” Louis soothes, rubbing the back of Liam’s neck. “Didn’t mean to seem surprised.” 

“I _do_ ,” huffs Liam, eyebrows furrowed together. “Don’t patronise me, Louis.” 

Louis gets in front of Liam, cups his face in both hands and stares so intently Cara and Harry might as well be completely invisible. “Don’t be a dickhead,” he tells him tenderly, stroking along his beard. 

Liam’s mouth twitches. 

Louis knocks their foreheads together. “You’re better at this than us, really, you know that. You and Fi’ve done nearly all the house repairs yourself. You were the only one who knew about that. I wouldn’t have lasted a goddamn day in all this, without you. You know that. Don’t be a dickhead.” 

Liam’s eyes crinkle into a smile before his mouth does. “But I’m good at being a dickhead,” he says. 

Harry watches them and feels warm from the inside, like when he was a kid and would briefly entertain the thought of Parent Trapping his Mum and Dad into getting back together. 

Harry and Nick haven’t spoken much since they fought last night — just “have you seen my blue jumper?” and “pass the honey, please” — but Liam and Louis fight all the time and still smile at each other like they’ve just seen the nicest picture they can imagine. 

“Soppy,” Cara sighs, and pushes Harry’s hand out of the way so she can see the map. “When did this house get so couple-y? Two by fucking two.” 

“Sorry,” Harry says. 

“You’re not.” 

Harry doesn’t argue. She’s right. He’s got Nick, and he can’t bring himself to be sorry for that. Not even if they’re fighting. Not ever. “Sorry about Gem and Niall, then,” he says, knowing that Cara and Gemma have been close. 

“Nah, Gem gets it.” Cara plucks the pink highlighter from Harry’s hand and circles a green patch by Watford. “Chicks before dicks. She’s got her priorities sorted. You lot, though.” She shakes her head. “Disgusting.” 

Liam and Louis are murmuring to each other in low voices, faces very close. Harry’s pretty sure they’re swapping words for male genitalia.  

“It’s nice,” Harry says. “They’re sweet together.” 

“They are,” Cara admits. “Although personally, I’d like it if you and Grimmy would wear gags. You two are the loudest couple I have ever heard in my life and I went to _boarding school._ Hell, I’d provide the gags. You could have fun with that, Haz. Gag away.” 

Harry considers the idea for a moment and it takes him about two seconds to realise that yes, yes he could have fun with that. 

“Nick’s got the loudest voice _in the universe._ You know if I don’t know where I am in the dark I can always find my way to your room because you two fuck _all the goddamn time_.” She circles another spot of land further north. “You think that’s too far? Nah, that’s fine, couldn’t be more than twenty miles.” 

“We don’t _all_ the time.” Harry smirks, feeling a bit lightened at the thought. He loves it when Nick gets loud. Makes him feel like one of those Greek or Roman gods, the ones whose stories always began with somebody fucking somebody else. 

“You are _so_ smug,” Cara says, and smacks the side of Harry’s head. 

“ _Hey_ ,” Harry whines, rubbing his ear. “Not my fault I’m talented.” 

“Oh my _god_.” Cara flops back onto the rug. “I physically can’t roll my eyes enough at that. Like, my eyeballs can only go so far back in my head.” 

“Twat,” Liam murmurs to Louis, lovingly. They’ve expanded their genital repertoire. 

“Could get a glass eye, like a pirate, and roll it all the way around,” Harry suggests. 

“Good plan. I’ll just yank these ones out and you go find me a glass eye at the shop.” 

A sharp rap on the door announces the arrival of Niall and Perrie, poking their heads through from the hallway. “Hiya,” Perrie says, waving. “We want to help, too.” 

Niall pushes past her and flops down on the floor between Harry and Cara. “Can’t stay here forever. If the cellar floods again, I’m moving to Majorca.” 

Harry doesn’t know what convinced them, but he feels the thrill of victory all the same. 

“Good then!” Louis breaks away from Liam and passes them both maps and highlighters. “We’re finding possible locations.” 

“Water source,” Niall says immediately. Before Niall teamed up with Gemma and Harry he hadn’t been great on boiling his drinking water. He had nearly shit out the entirety of the liquid in his body before they got him some pills and clean water. It’d been scenic. Harry scoots closer to Niall at the memory, draping himself obnoxiously over his back like a rucksack. Niall proceeds on as normal, leaning over the map. 

Liam nods. “We’re tracking rivers and streams, mostly. Can’t always trust stagnant water, you know.” 

“Isn’t that the truth,” Niall agrees, snorting. 

“Land,” Harry adds from Niall’s shoulder. “That’s a priority. We’re going to want to plant, and hopefully find some animals. It’d be better if it had been a farm already. Paddocks, or enough wood to build fences.”

“At least five bedrooms would be nice,” Perrie says. “Six or more, preferably, or a house with enough outbuildings we can convert.” 

“As little wall-to-wall carpeting as possible. That’d be a bloody nightmare to clean; we’d have to replace the flooring.” 

“And not _too_ far out of the city. We’d have to transport everything by bicycle anyhow, and we’d want to be in reasonable distance of scavenging just in case. Twenty, twenty-five miles.” 

“Country houses, maybe?” Cara rests her chin on her knee, folded up over the map like an acrobat. “We had one that would work, but it’s a bit too far, I think. I know I’ve been to ones that were closer, though.” 

“Maximum fireplaces, and window insulation.” 

“We’d be laughed right out the frame on Location, Location Location,” Harry says ruefully, looking over Louis’s shoulder at their list. “This’ll be a right nightmare to sort out.”

“Good thing there’s just been a mass vacancy in the housing market, then,” Niall notes, voice dry. 

“Just water, then,” Perrie says. “Water, and land, and distance.” 

By afternoon they map five main trips in order of viability. They’ll go in threes and start scouting as soon as the weather clears up. The weather’s been stormy lately, and no one wants to get caught out on a bicycle in unknown territory. 

By all accounts they had a very productive morning, but Nick’s face at lunchtime does a good job drowning the curl of eager anticipation unfurling in Harry’s belly. 

Nick stops Harry in the corridor with a wry smile that doesn’t meet his eyes. “You all plotting a hostile takeover, then?” 

“Louis wants to be captain of the ship,” Harry says. “He’s thinking about getting a parrot to perch on his shoulder. Wooden leg, hat with feathers. Whole bit.” 

“I’m not too worried. Fiona’ll make him walk the plank.” Nick shoves his hands in his pockets. He looks down the corridor towards the kitchen, then back at the front door, craning his neck like he’s doing a driving test. No one’s around, at least not that they can see. Nick rolls on the balls of his feet, tattered boots creaking. “Hey, so I don’t know what… Like, I don’t know what you all are planning. I just wanted to… You’re not thinking about, I don’t know, starting an independent colony or something, are you?” 

“What? No. What?” Harry shakes his head and reaches out to touch Nick’s wrist. He’s all tense, elbows tight and shoulders huddling around his ears. “Of course we’re not, what made you think that?” 

Nick shrugs, looking steadily at the wood floor. “You took all the maps.” 

“We’re scouting,” Harry explains. Nick’s expression doesn’t change so he continues, “Not to leave alone, but like, so that we can present options. When we all agree to. We don’t want to split up. _I_ don’t want to split up.” 

“Okay.” Nick chews his lower lip, sucking it in and out of his mouth. “Yeah, okay.” 

“Really.” Harry grabs Nick’s wrists and shakes them a little. “Splitting up is not even, like. It’s not even adjacent to the menu. It’s not in the same _language_ as the menu.” 

“Okay,” Nick repeats, letting his lip go so he can smile a bit. 

“It’s on, like, another _planet_ from the menu. If the menu’s on Earth, right, then splitting up is somewhere out by, what’s it, what’s the name of the galaxy we can see?” 

“Andromeda.” 

“Right, splitting up is on some wacko planet in Andromeda.” Harry shakes Nick’s wrists again, just as italics. “ _Andromeda_ , Nick. Or a galaxy so far away we never saw it to pick out a fancy name. That’s how far.” 

“ _Okay_ ,” Nick laughs, extracting himself from Harry’s grasp. “I get the idea. Just a thought.” 

“A really _dumb_ thought,” Harry grumps, shoulder bumping Nick into the balustrade. 

“All right, all right!” Nick shoves him back. “I get it, stop your violence, Styles. We’ve got faeces to dispose of, according to the chalkboard of our livelihoods. Fancy a trip to the Heath?” 

Harry does a lacklustre grin, all teeth and no eye crinkle. “Oh, more than life. There’s nothing in the world I love more than carting buckets of poo up hills, you know.” 

“What luck! This life was just made for you.” Nick smiles with his whole face, pumping his fist in an arc like a hardy American teenager in a 1950s film. “We could even get lucky: I think the cesspit’s nearly full. Better bring shovels!” 

“Yay,” Harry says weakly, and goes to find a scarf to tie over his nose. 

 

 

As April dawns the air turns windy, whipping tree branches against the windows of their little house. Harry wakes in the middle of the night to rhythmic tapping that reminds him unsettlingly of the time last summer some of the Camden gang surrounded their house and threw rocks at their windows. He also wakes to a full bladder, so he extracts himself from Nick’s grip and heads out of the room to wee. 

 _It’s like the olden days_ , Harry thinks. Chamber pots and all, although he stops short when the one in the toilet is completely full. He could wee in the sink and try to rinse it out with as little water as possible, but their garden is enclosed on all sides and Harry’s feeling brave, so he yanks on some trousers and goes downstairs to piss outdoors. 

Puppy follows him, tail wagging. Her nails click on the wood floor companionably, like a less toothy incarnation of Tic-Tock the crocodile from Peter Pan. 

Harry eases the kitchen door open and Puppy bounds through to relieve herself along a thicket of grass. Harry goes along the wall and makes jokes in his head about being wee buddies. They go back inside quickly. It’s cold, for April, and even with the garden being enclosed he doesn’t _entirely_ trust being out in the open — once Cara had needed to run back inside with her jeans half off because somebody’s attack dog tried to break the fence whilst she was pissing behind the shed. 

Harry zips himself up and makes his way back up the stairs, sleepy and moving slow. Puppy stops at the doorway and whines, looking back at Harry. 

“What?” 

Puppy whines again before going in. 

Nick sits upright in a puddle of blankets, face buried in his hands. His whole body shakes like a private earthquake. _Where’s the inhaler_ , Harry thinks, panicked, until he registers the sounds. Harry vaults onto the bed to wrap Nick up in both arms. Puppy follows like she can tell what’s happening, curling up over Nick’s feet and pressing her head to his calves. Maybe she does know what’s happening. Puppy’s been with Nick longer than Harry has, after all. 

“What is it? Was it a dream?” Harry brushes hair back from Nick’s face. Nick’s eyes are squeezed shut and he hides mostly behind his hands, shoulders going up and down with every choking gasp. 

“I… You were…” Nick trails off, still trembling. Harry grips at his body like he’s rooting him to the ground. After a minute, Nick seems to quiet down. “Gone,” he continues, small and hoarse, “You were gone. And Puppy, and I —” Nick clasps Harry’s jumper in a tight fist. 

“You — you thought we were, like. Gone? Really gone.” Harry’s ribs go tight. He’d promised Fiona, months and months ago. He promised not to leave Nick alone.

Nick nods. 

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, soft and fervent into Nick’s hair. He’s clutching onto Nick tight enough to leave bruises, probably. Nick holds on just as hard. “I’m sorry, Nick, I didn’t — we just went out for a wee, I’m sorry.” 

Nick presses his face into Harry’s neck. Harry can feel wet there, along the skin. 

“We won’t do it again,” Harry promises. “I’ll — I’ll get one of them bins like Cara has, like a chamber pot. Yeah?”

“I was alone, before,” Nick whispers, like a confession. “Me and Puppy. It was…” 

Harry keeps stroking his hair but Nick doesn’t finish his thought. “Don’t leave,” Nick says instead, fingers grasping at Harry’s jumper. “Just — don’t leave.” 

Harry pulls Nick’s face up and kisses him, tasting salt and sour fear. He tries to make the kiss a promise. He tries to channel every sick swoop of feeling that runs through him when he thinks about Nick alone, how if he could he’d want to merge them together so their ribs lock up and then maybe Nick won’t be so scared, after, or maybe Harry won’t be so worried, and maybe they’ll be okay together.

“I won’t,” Harry swears, when they pull apart. “I won’t.” 

 

 

The next week, because the universe has no respect for the sanctity of seasons, it snows. It’s April, and it _snows_. There was no snow all winter and suddenly, in springtime, Harry wakes to a bright room. At first he just feels like a kid again, off school for the day. Snow piles up over the street and paints the garden white, only a few inches but enough to hide the litter and abandoned cars under an idyllic mask.

His childish glee at the blanketed, transformed world dims a bit when he and Nick go down to breakfast to discover they have to melt snow for their water, or chip away at the icy pools if they don’t trust what comes from the sky. 

The next day, it snows again. The universe has no respect for seasons, and also it probably hates them. 

The other problem is the waste buckets. Normally one of them carts the waste every other day and dumps it into the cesspits they dig on the Heath. Once the cesspit fills up they bury it and dig a new one. It is, by far, the most disgusting task they have to complete. In the snow, the waste piles up with nowhere to go and the prospect becomes infinitely worse. After two days of snow and ice, three entire buckets of shit huddle in a row against the garden wall. 

Harry has become _far_ too familiar with the bowel movements of his housemates for comfort. 

“You already get up and friendly with Nick’s bum,” Louis says, when Harry whinges about the chamber pot filling up in the upstairs loo in about half a day. “Shouldn’t be too squeamish, Harold, you know what comes out.” 

“Suppose you feel the same about Liam, then?” 

Louis shrugs. “Shit is shit. I don’t think about it.” 

“Well, take a big whiff, because Li’s been using this pot as well.” Harry offers the heavy bin towards Louis. 

He gags and waves him off towards the door. “Bloody hell, you animal, dispose of that, won’t you?” 

Harry sighs and lugs the bucket outside, where snow is still piling up at a disconcerting rate. Well, another inch, but _still._ The waste buckets are nearly full. He’s not sure what they’ll do when they run out of containers. Bowls? Bin bags?

“Oi,” he calls, leaning his head into the kitchen. “Can we use the big bins for this?” 

“No,” Louis says, propping his feet up on the table and turning the page of his mystery novel. “We need those for water.” 

“Really? They haven’t sprung any leaks at all?” 

“Best believe it,” says Louis. Harry scowls. Louis looks all warm and inside, even if he’s wearing a coat and a hat in the kitchen. The wind is _howly_. 

Harry frowns and looks around the snow-covered garden, teeth chattering up their own personal storm in his skull. Surely the weather will let up shortly. 

“It’s _April_ ,” Harry tells the trees, sulky. His voice wavers through his clattering teeth. “What the _fuck_.” 

Harry sets the smaller bucket down next to the big one so they’re lined up by size, like really disgusting Goldilocks. He goes back in, stamping the snow from his boots and shaking white from his hair. 

“We’re running out of chamber pots.” Harry’s shivering wildly now, all damp and not sure whether it’s better to take the wet things off or leave them on because at least they’re knit. His hands feel cramped and numb, like they always do lately when he goes out in the cold for more than a few minutes. He thinks it’s probably some sort of vitamin deficiency, but hasn’t remembered to ask Zayn yet. 

“Just start shitting out the window, next.” Louis doesn’t look up from his book. “Like medieval people.” 

“They didn’t just shit out the window,” Nick says, coming in from the lounge. “They just chucked the stuff in the pots out the window — oh, Haz, you’re frozen. You’re an ice lolly. Come here.” Nick takes Harry’s icy fingers in his warm ones and blows on the tips, forehead all furrowed. “They’re all white, Harry. Is that normal? Louis, is this normal?” 

Louis looks up and shrugs. “Probably not.” 

 Nick clucks again, rubbing more frantically at Harry’s numb digits. “This can’t be normal. You’re going to get frostbite. It’ll ruin _all_ my plans for you. Here, c’mon in here, we’ve got a nice fire going.” 

Nick drags Harry through to the lounge and sits him down in front of the fire, muttering away. “White fingers, hell and more hell, I’m going to ask Zayn about this when he finally emerges from his snow sex nest, for fuck’s sake. Literally. What have you been eating? Well, I know, but what _haven’t_ you been eating? It’s the vitamins, I’d bet, I swear gummy ones go off. Not natural, little teddy bear faces sustaining your entire life force.” 

Nick doesn’t seem to expect much conversation so Harry lets him chatter whilst he divests Harry of his wet things until he’s down to his jumper and thermals, tucked against Nick’s chest with a blanket wrapped around them both. 

“Here you go, this’ll help,” Fiona says from the doorway, and Nick wraps Harry’s fingers around hot ceramic until he’s holding the mug properly. 

“What’s this, then?” Harry asks, as Nick accepts one of his own. 

“Hot toddy,” Fiona says, and curls up next to them. She’s got a scarf wound all round her neck so that her pink face peeks up over the top. She blows over the top of her drink, watching steam curl up in the air. “Well, sort of. Close enough.” 

“It’s nice,” Harry tells her, taking little sips. 

“It’s like we’re just off the slopes,” Nick says dreamily, resting his head over Harry’s. 

Fiona snorts. “As if you ever skied anywhere but to the bar.” 

“That’s still skiing! Harold, tell Fifi that’s still skiing.” 

“That’s still skiing,” Harry repeats dutifully. Fiona’s made the drinks properly strong. Curls of dizzy heat sweep comfortingly over Harry’s limbs and he sags back further into Nick’s arms, feeling very safe. He wants to snog Nick properly but he’s all the way up there, and Fiona’s right next to them and it’s probably rude. 

“How are your toes, Hazza?” Fiona asks, kicking her foot so it knocks against Harry’s.

Fiona has a way of asking questions in a very earnest, sensible sort of way so that Harry immediately assumes they’re rather critical and important, instead of silly. If Harry asked someone how their toes were they’d laugh, probably. He wonders if it’s in the accent. Though, actually, there was that frozen fingers bit before, so Harry supposes it’s not entirely silly. 

“Good, I think,” Harry says. He wriggles them experimentally. They tingle. “Yeah, good.” 

“Don’t want to lose any toes,” Nick tells him sternly, nose doing something odd in Harry’s hair. “Not allowed.” 

“I’ll let them know the rules,” Harry says, and wiggles them again. The tingling feels weird. Like Aftershock for the feet. 

“So when are you lot going to look for our new farm home?” Fiona asks, and Harry sighs, because he’d really rather not fight right now. As amenable as Fiona has been to the idea, he doesn’t want to have to have this conversation with Nick when he’d rather continue his exploration of Aftershock toes and post-snow cuddles.  

“Whenever the weather clears up,” Harry tells her shortly, and she nods. 

Nick just pats his head and nuzzles his nose deeper into Harry’s hair, and Harry tries not think about anything except how weird it would be if specific parts of your body could take shots. 

In the kitchen, Gemma and Louis are arguing good-naturedly about that mystery novel both of them have read four or five times. Harry can’t quite make out the words, only that their spat seems to include quite a lot of giggling. The house feels good. Warm, homey. He understands why Nick doesn’t want to leave. He just needs to show Nick that it’s not about the house, not really. 

Fiona shifts and lies down so that her head is pillowed on Nick’s knee. Her hair tumbles across the fabric of his pyjama bottoms over onto Harry’s thermals, like an invading chestnut sea creature. 

“One of you pet my hair, please,” she says, and Nick and Harry bump hands in their rush to obey. Nick wins out in the end, which Harry thinks is probably wise, as Nick has the longest, strongest fingers and he knows how to pet just right. 

“You all right, baby?” Nick asks, tucking a curl behind Fiona’s ear. 

“Talk later,” Fiona says, and Nick’s nod jostles Harry’s head a bit. 

A cold little knot of possessiveness tightens up in Harry’s gut, although he tries not to give it too much credence. He knows there are things Fiona and Nick speak about that Harry doesn’t get to be a part of, just like there are things he and Nick speak about that Fiona doesn’t get to see. Nick calls Fiona baby to be sweet. It _is_ sweet, and Nick isn’t even interested in women like that. 

Harry is, and probably always will be, a ridiculous human being. Even after the end of the world. The thought is almost comforting, like he knows which parts of his personality sink down to the bottom and stay in the glass, even when the rest of the drink is gone. 

Harry budges around so he’s sat more sideways, cheek pressed to Nick’s chest. He takes a few deep breaths, and relaxes every part of his body in order. He feels so heavy, like he could probably sink right through the floor to the cellar at any moment. Nick slides his free hand up Harry’s back and rests it on the nape of his neck, playing with the hair there. 

“My two favourite curlies,” Nick says. His voice is as warm as their drinks, as warm as Harry’s thermals, as warm as the fire.  

“I won’t tell Liam,” Harry promises drowsily.

“His hair’s too short to be proper curly, think you’re safe. Well, maybe his beard. Do beards count?” 

“You have curly hair too,” Fiona reminds Nick, poking at his knee. 

“Kinda.” Nick shakes out his hair, jostling Harry a bit on his chest. “Look at us. Like we’re all part of the same group.” 

“Same family,” Fiona agrees, closing her eyes. 

“Eugh, don’t say that. I do too many things with Harry that are not family-friendly, Fifi.” 

“Kinky,” Harry mumbles. 

“Go back to sleep, Harold. You don’t have to hear this rubbish.” 

Harry coughs, rubbing his nose on one hand. “Maybe I’m into it, Grim. You don’t know.” 

“Please don’t,” Fiona sighs, long-suffering, as if she were quite accustomed to Nick and Harry starting role-playing sex scenes whilst she tried to nap. Come to think of it, though, that isn’t _terribly_ far from the truth. The walls really are quite thin.

“We’re not.” Nick shifts so he can lie down too. “We’re napping. C’mon. Let’s nap. Nice snowy winter’s nap. In April.” 

“You both snore.” Fiona’s frowning, breathing deeply already. “I’m going to last five minutes with that. You two stay awake, I’ll nap.” 

“‘Kay,” Harry says, eyes fluttering shut.

When he comes to, Fiona has left, presumably driven away by both of their sleep trumpeting. True to form, Nick is snoring pretty loudly, his mouth half open. Harry curls them closer together. 

“Wake up,” Harry whispers in Nick’s ear. “Wake up, Nick, I’m bored.” 

“Do a puzzle,” Nick mumbles, fumbling for Harry’s face so that he can press a finger to his lips. “Shh. Sleep, now.” 

“Nope. It’s awake time now.” Harry pokes Nick in the side. “C’mon Grimmy, c’mon, wakey-wakey.” 

The groan Nick releases can probably be heard in Bristol. “Fine,” he huffs, rolling to his back and pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes. “What _is_ it?” 

Harry pauses, formulating. “Have you heard about the new artificial water-based seasonal rapper?” 

Nick doesn’t reply. 

“You should really check him out. He’s called Fross-T.” 

Nick snorts, and hits Harry over the head with the corner of his blanket. “Rubbish,” he says finally, flopping back. He’s grinning, though, eyes crinkling beautifully at the corners. Harry beams. _No one_ can resist him. No one. “Thought you were going to go with Vanilla Ice.” 

“Oh, that one would have been good.” Harry thinks for a minute. “Run DMC-sonal.” 

“Snowp Dogg,” Nick says. “Pun challenge, Harold. Loser has to do the washing up.” 

“Negative 50 Centigrade.” 

“Ice Cube.” 

“Foul!” Harry makes a cross sign with his hands. “Foul, red card. No alterations in that one. Doesn’t count.” 

“Mos _def_ initely fucking cold?” 

Harry pushes Nick until he sprawls over the rug, laughing. “Double red card.” 

“Ah, football knowledge with Harry Styles. Tell me more about this ‘red card’ of which you speak.” 

“Like you have any football knowledge,” Harry scoffs, collapsing back so they’re lying next to each other. 

“I could do! Did a thing once for radio, and besides, my dad liked footie.” Nick takes one of Harry’s hands in his and examines it, blowing over his fingertips. Harry presses them to his mouth as he continues, “My brother and sister, too. Whole family but me.” 

Nick doesn’t mention his family much. It’s nice how he did, though, like he’s not sad: just happy to remember the match on telly, and how maybe his whole family would cram into the lounge whilst he rolled his eyes like it was some big imposition on his day, even if he’d caught the train just to join them. “Did you try to pretend to like it or anything, when you were a kid? Like, because they’d have the match on?” 

“Nah.” Nick kisses the tip of Harry’s index finger, and that Aftershock tingly limb feeling comes back. “Just wanted to watch Madonna, didn’t I? I’d come downstairs whilst the footie was on and try to do performances in front of the telly. Drove my dad _mental_.” He pitches his voice low, “What the bleedin’ ‘ell is he doin?” 

Harry grins. When they were kids Gemma used to direct Harry in similar performances, decked out in pearls and singing the Spice Girls under her expert guidance. “Did you dress up too? Give a monologue or summat? Do a song?” 

“All of the above. He wanted me to be a footballer so I thought I’d do him proud, you know. I remember once, with my sister’s zebra-print leggings…” Nick kisses Harry’s knuckle lightly, then snorts. “And, of course, my excellent renditions of Prince. If it weren’t for my utter lack of vocal ability, I could’ve gone far.” 

“I believe it. Nicki Grimaj, perhaps?” 

Nick tugs at Harry’s hand so he’s forced to sprawl over him, Harry’s legs between Nick’s. “All the way back to T4, Styles? Hell, _I_ barely remember that. Or, really, most of those shows. I was very hungover that… decade.” 

“I was a big fan.” Harry smirks. Nick’s eyes go wide when Harry shifts their hips together. He loves the easy way he can make Nick’s face go open and wanting. He wants to do it all the time. He wants Nick to look at him like that all the time. 

If Harry sucks Nick off really quickly in the lounge, _surely_ the odds of one of their housemates stumbling in and yelling at them can’t be _too_ high. 

“No,” Nick says flatly, removing Harry’s hand from his jeans. “Absolutely not.” 

Harry pouts. “You’re no fun.” 

“I am a barrel of laughs, Harold Styles. _You_ are a heathen.” 

“Well, it’s the apocalypse. Aren’t we all?” 

Nick sits up and tugs Harry with him in a jolty ascent to their feet. “The _post_ -apocalypse, as you are so fond of reminding us all. Now take me to bed, if you’re so eager.” 

Harry swats Nick’s arse on the way up the stairs. No jobs today. He wants to stay in bed and get the sheets so disgusting they have to chuck them and start over. It’s good to have goals. 

 

 

The snow melts. Gradually, April starts to look more like April, and less like December. Green buds sprout on the trees that drape over their house and rabbits and foxes dart through the garden at all hours. Fire burns somewhere to their east, bringing smoke over the warming air. Harry climbs Parliament Hill and tracks the burning, hoping the winds don’t shift.

 Louis, Liam and Cara return from their first trip looking tired, sweaty and discouraged. 

“Nothing good,” Cara tells him, unloading the supplies they looted on their way back. Louis brushes past them on his way upstairs, muttering something indistinctly swear-y. “A few places looked okay at first, but one had… Yeah, you don’t want to know.” 

Cara stares down at the boxes of tampons and packets of Pot Noodle with a set mouth. She pulls tins from her bag, stacking the tinned peaches alongside the mandarins in syrup. Her thin hands quiver. 

Harry shakes his head. She’s right. He doesn’t want to know. It’d just be another thing to shove into a box and sink, weighing him down. Harry’s got goals. He doesn’t need any more dead weight. 

 

 

The scouting continues. Perrie, Niall and Harry plan to leave a little after dawn on the next clear day. Niall has a wind-up watch that they assume is approximately accurate, so he’ll wake them. 

“I don’t like it,” Nick says, muffled into Harry’s neck as they curl together in bed. “It’s far.” 

“Only a bit,” Harry assures him. He runs a careful hand up and down Nick’s back. “We’re going in teams, so. It’s just like raiding. We’ll be okay.” 

Nick sighs, holding on even more tightly. He hasn’t emerged from Harry’s neck for the past half hour. Harry thinks this might be his form of peaceful protest. Like a sit in. “You should’ve gone with Louis and Liam, or Cara. They’ve got all them muskets, and Cara’s well hard.” 

Harry laughs, stroking Nick’s hair in that way he likes, running his nails in circles over his scalp. “I thought you hated the rifle.” 

“I _do_.” Harry can’t see Nick’s face, but he can tell by his tone that he’s pouting a veritable storm. “But you should still have it if you’re going out there.” 

“We’ll be careful,” Harry promises, pressing a kiss to the sliver of Nick’s forehead visible above his sulking crouch. 

Nick’s arms tighten until he’s properly clinging on, like a child to his teddy bear or a drowning man to his buoy. “You better. If you die, I’ll kill you.” 

“And play summat awful at the funeral, I’d bet.” 

“Ragtime,” Nick informs him grumpily. 

“Rough.”

“Well. You’d deserve it.” 

Harry wiggles down until Nick is forced to let go enough for Harry to line their bodies up again, hip to hip. Nick keeps his eyes closed, like kids do — if I can’t see you, you can’t see me. Harry strokes along his cheek. “Hey.” 

“Hi,” Nick says, eyes still squeezed shut. 

“I’m not — Nick, I’m not going to go anywhere.” 

“Well, _that_ ’s a patent lie.” 

“I mean… I mean, not _properly_. I wouldn’t, I swear, I wouldn’t.” Harry cups Nick’s face in both hands, putting their foreheads together in case you can transmit thoughts by bumping skulls. He wants Nick to see his certainty. He wants Nick to see that he’s doing this for him, too: that Harry wants them to _live_ , and be together, and this is a way to make sure that happens. Nick doesn’t open his eyes. Apparently, thought transmission’s still not on. This science fiction life is bollocks if they haven’t got magical powers. 

“What, like people always intend to shuffle off the mortal coil, or whatever?” Nick’s face is squinted so much he’s mostly nose and eyebrow wrinkles. 

“Shuffle off the mortal coil?”

“Lots of time. Lots of reading,” Nick grumps, fisting Harry’s jumper in one hand. Harry counts it as progress. “I’m proper educated now, you know.” 

“We’ll be careful,” Harry promises, laying soft kisses along the bridge of Nick’s nose and on his scarred eyebrow and up the puckered skin of his mottled freckly forehead. “We’ll be careful, love, and it’ll be just fine.” 

“I don’t believe you.”

“Fine.” Harry kisses the side of his mouth, and then lightly over his lips, increasing the pressure slowly until Nick’s mouth opens under his, warm and wet. “I’ll believe enough for the both of his,” he says half into Nick’s lips, and kisses him with all the certainty he feels but can’t find the words to say. They grip each other tightly, hips rutting together after barely any time at all and Nick’s tongue is thick and hot in Harry’s mouth. 

With great effort Harry tries to tug Nick’s jumper over his head but Nick whines, batting him away. “’S too cold,” he insists, and Harry rolls his eyes and gets them both under the duvet, where heat builds much faster with every jolt of their bodies. 

Harry had intended to suck Nick’s dick like it was going out of style, but Nick clearly has other ideas when he pins Harry to the mattress and makes his way down his torso, sucking and biting all the way. 

Harry doesn’t ask. He knows what the marks mean. _I was here_ , they promise, up and down Harry’s body. _I was here._

 

 

After far too short a slumber, a sharp rap on the door rouses Harry to grudging consciousness. The room is still blueish with the light of dawn, and he’s deeply cross at the interruption until the reality of the location scouting errand kicks in. Harry untangles himself from Nick’s embrace and settles himself cross-legged so he can pull Nick’s head into his lap. 

“C’mon, babe,” he whispers, stroking the hair from Nick’s face. “I’ve got to leave in a minute.” 

“Don’t,” Nick mumbles, twisting until his nose is mashed up against Harry’s thigh. He presses a kiss there, light and lingering. “Stay here.” 

“Can’t, love.” Harry keeps stroking, thumbs soft over the thin, freckled skin of Nick’s high forehead. He tries to remember the last time he made a Harry Potter joke about Nick’s scar. Too long, he decides. “This is your burden, ‘cos you’re the boy who lived, and all.” 

Nick burrows further into Harry’s lap and ignores his lazy attempt at humour. “Still cross with you.” 

“I know.” Harry bends forward to kiss Nick’s cheeks and then eases out from under him to get dressed. “We’ll be back sometime this afternoon or evening, depending. I’ll give you a nice blowjob. Or two.” 

“Three,” croaks Nick, sleep-hoarse. “I’ll have developed the stamina of a —” He yawns, wide. “Of a… stamina-having thing.” 

“Three,” Harry agrees, and then leans across the bed to kiss Nick goodbye. He means it to be a light one, but Nick gets his hand over Harry’s neck and holds him in so their mouths move slick and deep. Harry whimpers, embarrassingly, and Nick’s grip tightens at the sound. 

“Okay,” Nick says, a little breathy when they pull apart. “You go conquer things. Bring me back a stallion, or summat.” 

Harry frames his crotch with his hands. He’s got a semi, so it’s not completely without visual interest. “You ordered?” 

Nick rolls his eyes and chucks a pillow at him. Puppy yelps at the disruption to her sleeping spot and gets up to circle down again in a different corner of the bed. “Get out of here,” Nick sighs, waving him off. 

“Bye,” Harry repeats, beaming at him for another minute. He wonders if he’ll ever get over the sight of Nick, sleep-rumpled and puffy-eyed in their bed. He hopes not. 

Perrie, Niall and Harry take off less than fifteen minutes later, the map folded up and tucked in Niall’s breast pocket — “Harry’d just lose it,” Niall had said quite correctly, and Perrie hadn’t wanted to navigate anyway — and their bicycles packed up with enough supplies to get them there and back, and to spend a night, if they have to. Perrie takes the Polaroid camera with them. 

“Easier to convince everyone if they can see it,” she says, shrugging.

Harry grins. “That’s brilliant. You should probably be knighted.” 

Perrie places a hand to her heart. “All of my dreams. Sir Perrie of the realm. Maybe we can break into Buckingham Palace and borrow a sword for the ceremony.” 

“Don’t want to take too many of those, mate.” Niall nods towards the camera, strapping up his bicycle. “Might be the last pictures we ever take, those.” 

“I’ve got lots of film, but, yeah.” Perrie makes a face, swinging her leg over her bicycle seat and settling down. Harry does the same, leaning back to check that everything is securely fastened and nearly falling over. He catches himself, but it’s a close call. 

They cycle for ages through deserted streets and up the long, empty stretch of the A5 before emerging from the press of houses. Without a phone or watch, Harry has no idea how long they ride. The land goes on forever, engulfing their bodies as they wind through cancerous clusters of suburban areas to the green patches of fields that lie scattered around Greater London.

“Should be some places around here,” Niall says as they take a water break on the corner of a road promisingly labeled “Packhorse Lane”. It’s barely a lane, really: more of a path. Minimally paved, just wide enough for one car, and along the edge a worn wooden fence indicates that these fields were for something beyond aesthetics. Hopefully. Niall unfolds the map and kneels over it, squinting. 

“Let’s eat summat and then have a look.” Perrie tugs little satchels of nuts and dried fruit from her pack and passes Harry one. “Blood sugar, Haz. You’re looking a bit peaky.” 

Harry feels a bit peaky, so he takes the snack with gratitude and eats it. He hadn’t realised how hungry he was until he started chewing, and finishes the portion in about half a second. He could probably eat twelve more, but they haven’t got twelve more. 

They’re off again when they’ve all had enough to drink, only to stop ten minutes later when Harry gives a great squawk of glee. 

“Horses!” Harry shouts, pointing over. “Look, horses!” 

They’re a bit lean, and sort of wild looking with their rough coats but — _horses_. Maybe other animals have survived as well. The three of them exchange delighted looks. Perrie’s eyes go even bigger, and Niall’s twinkle with barely-contained excitement. 

Niall’s face splits into the kind of grin that could restore peace to the world, probably. “I’ve got a good feeling about this one.”

Harry nods, heart unfurling in his chest. 

They keep cycling, stopping at one farm only to find that the roof has caved in on most of the outbuildings, then doubling back after they accidentally enter another sprawling suburban neighbourhood. Despite it all, Harry can’t quash the roar of possibility that paces like a lion in his body. Sometimes, when Harry’s hauling about two stone of tinned soup a mile and a half by foot or cranking slowly up Fitzjohn’s Avenue from Swiss Cottage to Hampstead on his lowest gear, the impenetrability of a landscape without cars or trains or airplanes can feel so claustrophobic Harry almost wants to cry. Here, though, on a bicycle, under wispy clouds surrounded by field and sky, the big world feels open. 

Signs of human life linger in tiny patches across the landscape, jolting Harry right through at the thought that there are _people_ out here, somewhere. People not them, maybe people not in the gangs. Along the grassy paths Harry spies a few patches of garden that look too orderly to be natural. One town they avoid, wary of the blood red graffiti that screams _private property_ and _looters will be punished_ in jagged scrawl all over the low brick houses surrounding the town centre. 

After twenty more minutes of aimless cycling and poking around, Niall leads them through to cracked pavement veering off the thickly forested road. He dismounts whilst still rolling, standing on one pedal as his bicycle crests towards the thicket of buildings ahead. Perrie follows his lead, but Harry, aware that if he were to attempt that he would probably be not long for this mortal coil, elects to cycle normally until they pull up in front of the house. 

 _This looks like a home_ , is Harry’s first nonsensical thought. The forest recedes behind them to reveal a big, stone main house with three entire chimneys and ivy growing in verdant clumps over the doorway. Forest and fields surround the house on all sides, parting for a cluster of buildings towards the back. Harry loves it immediately. He’s afraid to love it so much. _There could be an infestation of animals_ , he reminds himself. _Or the inside could be collapsed. Or there could be no water nearby, even if they’d been following alongside the river, maybe the river is contaminated maybe_ — Harry takes a breath. They haven’t seen anything yet. 

“I love it,” Perrie breathes, and Harry feels immediately better. 

“That ivy all over the front’s a good sign,” Niall admits. “Not cared for means no one’s taken it. And the fields are all overgrown too.” 

They stash their bicycles by the side of the house, then creep round the building to scope out the back. Harry counts ten buildings in all circled around what might have been been a roundabout before the grass grew in. He recognises a few barns and a shed and a chicken coop — no chickens — and some low brick buildings he doesn’t know names for. 

“That’s an orchard, there.” Perrie points past one of the barns to a cluster of gnarled trees. “Walnuts, I think.” 

“Oh holy fuck, that’s a well,” Niall says, and runs over to a mossy stone circle. The wood cover splinters as they heave it over the edge, revealing a deep chasm tinged green and lined with stones. 

Harry leans over the side. “ _Hiiii,_ ” he calls, and laughs as his voice echoes up around him. It sounds like there’s a chorus of small Harrys standing at the base yelling back. Harry gnomes. Harry elves. “ _Helloooooo!_ ” Niall pulls him away by the jacket, swearing. 

“Jesus, Haz, you’ll fall in and get us all in the shite.” 

“Wasn’t going to fall,” Harry grumps, but can’t hold onto it for too long because that’s a _real live well_ and the rope may be completely disintegrated but it could be repaired. A _well_. He could do a jig. 

Niall shakes his head. “Fuck, I hope the house is all right. This place is… Fucking _perfect_.” 

It’s not entirely perfect. The outbuildings are all in some state of disrepair — a few of them they can’t even get into, they’re so rotten — and weeds and ivy have grown rampant over everything, but there’s a fully built chicken coop and a well, and it’s more than Harry can quite hope for. 

The glass in the front door proves too thick to break in their traditional way, via brute force and weaponry, so they circle round to the back and hoist Perrie through a window. She unlocks the back door for them a minute later, beaming. Through the ivy she looks for a minute like a Disney princess, Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella welcoming them to her cottage. 

“Floor’s fine,” she reports, bouncing on her toes, “A lot of carpeting, but we can manage. Ceiling’s good, too. C’mon, come see, it’s amazing.” 

The open kitchen smells, typically, like rot. The smell isn’t going to put Harry off because with each successive room he’s more dead certain that this — _this_ is their house. Dark wood trims the walls and massive stone fireplaces squat like friendly dragons in nearly every room. The cellar harbours no puddles of stagnant water. The dowdy furniture looks lived-in but not entirely pulverised. In the living room, an upright piano leans behind an ancient check print sofa. Harry tests the keys, letting off notes linger through the room like the taste of whiskey after a shot. 

The stairs creak up to the first floor. Crooked bookshelves at the top give way to a white-washed corridor, and a row of bedrooms. The second floor looks much the same, only with slanted ceilings that cradle over beds like bunks in a ship. 

They’re quiet as they come back downstairs. Harry doesn’t want to speak and break the spell. If he says _it’s perfect_ the ceiling might dislodge over their heads, or the floor could cave in. _It’s not perfect_ , he reminds himself, like the spell of that reminder will keep disaster at bay. Some animals have moved in to the front hall, but that’s easily fixed. Wall-to-wall carpeting in all the upstairs, not ideal, but they can probably figure out how to take that out. 

“So far no corpses,” Niall says finally, checking the utility room. 

Harry examines a painting on the rough wall. A middle-aged man stares off into the distance, perhaps contemplating the colour of his wrinkled cravat. He adjusts the heavy gilt frame. “I’ll name him Gilbert,” he decides. 

“These wellies are in my size,” says Perrie, emerging from the utility room with a green pair clenched in her fist. 

“I don’t want to say it first,” Niall says. “You say it first.” 

“I don’t want to say it first either,” Harry says, covering Gilbert’s eyes so he can’t join in on the jinxing. 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” sighs Perrie. She drops the wellies in the middle of the kitchen table. “This place is fucking _perfect._ ” 

Well, if it’s jinxed, the jinx is on Perrie. 

In a great burst of joy they throw their arms around each other in the middle of the yellow, rotting kitchen, letting out shrieks that tear deliriously from Harry’s throat. 

A moment later, the sound of a shotgun rips through their reverie and they fall silent as fast as if someone had pulled a plug. 

Harry wonders if he’ll ever stop using electricity similes. 

Also, he was right about the jinx. 

“Come out!” somebody shouts, “Who’s in there, come out right now! We’re armed!” 

Perrie, Niall and Harry are not armed. They had considered toting the rifle with them but they’ve only got a few bullets for it anyway and none of them know how to shoot. Harry raises his hands like he’s on a police procedural and follows Niall out the back door. 

Three people stand in the clearing. They’re all three young, maybe mid-thirties, and very attractive, like they were cast by in an American telly programme about life after the virus. The two men sport beards thicker than Liam’s and one of them is the biggest man Harry’s sure he’s ever seen. He’s so massive he makes the very tall man next to him look average height. The woman has long unkept hair and a patchwork jumper, like she’s in the 1960s. 

“Who are you?” asks the giant one. Niall freezes up completely against Harry’s shoulder. He has an Irish accent. “What are you doing here?” 

“You Irish?” Niall’s voice is thin, like an echo, or a ghost. “You — are you Irish?” 

The giant lowers his rifle, face slackening. Suddenly he’s a decade younger. “Yeah. Are — where are you from?” 

“Mullingar,” Niall says dumbly, and the giant drops his rifle altogether. 

“Bres —” warns the other man, but he and the woman both lower their rifles too. 

“You’re shitting me,” says the giant. There’s a light now behind his eyes, and he looks outrageously handsome. Harry’s not putting it past the Americans to have cast this particular drama. 

“Not shitting you, no,” Niall says. “Mullingar born and bred, before I moved to London for uni.” 

“Holy fucking shite, mate, that’s where I’m from too,” shouts the giant, and Harry’s not sure what’s happening but he’s pretty sure he likes it because all of a sudden the giant and Niall are embracing, chatting away and wiping their eyes like they’ve just been reunited with their families. 

Harry supposes that, in a way, they have been. 

“Hi,” Perrie says awkwardly, waving at the other two. “We’re not Irish.” 

“Neither are we,” says the woman, and laughs. 

The other man still looks a little hesitant, still clutching his rifle. The woman knocks her shoulder into his massive one. “It’s fine, Ben. Look at them. They’re just kids.” 

Ben nods, and puts his rifle next to the woman’s in the grass. 

“I’m Lou,” the woman says, “And this one’s Ben and the one who’s about to elope with yours is Bressie. Niall Breslin.” 

Harry laughs. “You’re joking. Ours is called Niall, too. Niall Horan.” 

Even Ben laughs at that, and his teeth are white against his beard. Handsome, again. Must be something in the water. 

“I’m Perrie,” Perrie says, and reaches her hand out to shake. “This is our Harry.” 

“Perrie and Harry,” muses Lou. “I like it. Sorry about before. Didn’t mean to scare you too bad. We heard you shout down that well and thought you might be from town. We’ve heard they didn’t do so well this winter, so. We can’t be too careful.” 

“What _are_ you doing out here?” Ben asks. “I know everybody from this area, and I’ve never seen you three before.” 

Harry and Perrie explain about London, and their soggy house, and their plans for the farm and chickens and goats. Ben and Lou nod seriously and agree at points. Even though neither of them can be more than five years older than Nick and Fiona, Harry feels bizarrely comforted. It’s like he’s just been assured by grown-ups that his plans aren’t stupid, maybe like he has parents again, and they’re approving his life choices. 

Niall and Bressie are thick as thieves already, and when they rejoin them Bressie’s got his massive arm slung around Niall’s neck. They’re both beaming wide.

“Can’t wait to introduce you to Gemma,” Niall’s saying, “She’s amazing — that idiot’s sister, guess who got all the good genes — and she’s not going to fucking believe this.” 

“Can’t wait, mate. You should meet the kids at ours, too — twelve of us now, might be thirteen if Tom and Lou keep —”

“Oh, shut up,” Lou says, kicking out at Bressie’s foot. 

“You lot have got to move out here,” Bressie swears. “And not just because I’m in dire need of a fellow Irishman.” 

“We’d really like to,” Harry says. He decides to leave out the part where they haven’t necessarily convinced the others. “Like, especially if you could give us some pointers, with growing things and all.” 

Lou nods. “We ran a farm, before. Organic produce, and a program where kids could come and see the animals. You’ve — I’m sure you’ve got skills amongst your lot that we don’t. I’m sure we could work out some sort of agreement.” 

Bressie waves one massive hand. “Agreement,” he scoffs, and jostles Niall. “Practically family. From Mullingar, and all! Brilliant.” 

“Fuck yes,” agrees Niall, punching Bressie’s side.

“Bres,” Ben warns again. When Ben isn’t smiling, he looks like a very handsome yet constipated statue.  

Bressie quiets. “Ah, fine. But we’ll help you out, swear it. Hey, why don’t you come round, see our place?” 

Harry’s feet are clumsy with system shock as he follows Ben and Lou and the conjoined pair that was formerly separately known as Niall and Bressie through the woods. Harry doesn’t quite know where he can put his excitement. It shakes through his limbs and dizzies up his brain. He’s so excited he feels nauseated, like a kid on Christmas morning. 

Up ahead, they come upon a network of outbuildings not unlike the ones they just left, only these look clean and well cared for. 

Beside the clean, un-rotton wood, there’s chickens, and goats, and a few cows, and at least three people that Harry can count besides their party. He feels so excited he might actually be sick all over the stone. 

“Like Bressie said, we’ve twelve of us in total,” Lou explains, waving to the cluster of figures that are gathering around the back of the house and staring like they’ve all of them seen ghosts. “Most from around this area, and a few stragglers. We even have an American of our very own. Makes the best jam in the county.” 

“Not hard to do.” A tall girl with blond hair and a flat American accent stands by the chickens, arms akimbo, shark eyes darting between the newcomers. “There’s about fifty people left in this entire county.” 

“Fifty-three, now,” says Ben. “Taylor, this is Harry, Niall and Perrie. They’re scouting to move into the old Nelson place.” 

Harry is about to offer his hand to shake when a tiny girl darts out of the chicken coup, her fair hair done up in little bunches. She’s got a round face and a patched grey jumper and Harry can no longer manage proper words because his nose is all clogged up. 

“ _Lux_ ,” Lou sighs, going to pick her up. “What have we said about going in the chicken coop?” 

“Naughty?” asks Lux, putting a bit of Lou’s long hair in her mouth. 

“That’s right, naughty.” Lou extracts her hair from Lux’s grip and turns around, balancing the girl on her hip. “All right, Harry?” 

“I haven’t —” He coughs, flushing. “Sorry, just. I haven’t seen any kids, since. Since it happened.” 

Lou’s face softens. “Oh, honey,” she says, and Harry looks down at his feet. He’s going to need new shoes soon. His right boot is growing a hold in the toe. “Luxie, this is our new friend Harry. Harry, this is my kid, Lux.” 

“Hi,” Lux says shyly, ducking behind her mum’s shoulder. She peeks one round eye over the knit. 

“Hi, Lux,” Harry says, waving. “D’you like the chickens?” 

Lux nods. 

Harry beams. “What’s your favourite chicken?” 

“Show you,” she says, and wiggles until Lou sets her down. “C’mon, show you.” 

Harry looks at Lou for a moment and Lou nods, making shooing motions with her hands. “Go on,” Lou says, “Get acquainted.” 

Perrie and Niall follow Bressie to take a tour of the rest of the house and leave Lux and Harry to become fast friends. Lux shows him the chickens, and tells him each of their names — Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Matthew, and then the big rooster is Aristotle —and after she has to show him the goats and the cow and then she decides it’s really important that she and Harry make crowns out of hay and wear them. Harry’s got an itchy ring of braided hay sat in his hair when another woman approaches, carrying a small baby on her hip. 

“Hiya,” Harry says, sniffling a bit at the dusty air. 

“So you’re the child-whisperer, then,” the woman says, and smiles. “I’m Meredith. You’ve met my husband, Ben?” 

Harry nods. “Fond of a rifle.” 

Meredith shakes her head. “Don’t mind him. He’s a bit high-strung, lately. Protective.” 

Harry can’t take his eyes off the tiny person balanced on Meredith’s torso. “Is that your baby?” 

“Mm-hm.” Meredith settles into the straw and Lux immediately starts braiding her a crown. “This is Eli.” 

“Hi, Eli,” Harry says, and puts a finger out for Eli to grab. He does, tiny fingers closing over Harry’s big one, and Harry’s heart melts into a puddle of former human. “Wow,” he sighs, looking down at Eli’s chubby cheeks and floppy, pudgy arms. 

“You want to hold him?” 

Harry blinks. “I — yes, of course. If that’s okay.” 

“That’s okay,” Meredith says, and transfers Eli to Harry’s arms with only minimal whimpering on Eli’s part. Lux looks a bit put out. Meredith pulls her into her vacant lap so that she giggles and flops, devoting herself to braiding straw into Meredith’s long, dark hair. 

Harry peers down into Eli’s small face. He’s got to be less than a year old. So new. Eli looks up at Harry with big, calm eyes, like an owl. He’ll have no memories of televisions or shopping centres, or the metal grind of traffic, or the spread of sickness and what happened after. Eli won’t have a box full of empty bedrooms and death certificates locked up tight in his body. Harry’s eyes tear up a bit, again. He’s missed little kids. He’s missed hearing them laugh and listening to their funny stories and seeing their wide eyes take in the world for the very first time. Eli grabs a bit of Harry’s hair and pulls, face scrunching in surprise when the curl springs back. 

This is the only world Eli has ever known. He won’t miss anything at all. 

Harry leans his head down so Eli can get at more of his hair. He looks very pleased with himself, all gummy smile and chubby cheeks. “How old is he?” 

“Seven months,” Meredith says proudly. “And yes, before you ask, I had him here. Lou and Tom have only birthed animals before, but they did fine by me.” 

“That’s good,” Harry says, beaming. “One of my housemates, Zayn, he was a medical student. So, if you need any more, like. Help, or anything.” Eli yanks more of Harry’s curls and gurgles with laughter. 

Meredith raises her eyebrows, obviously impressed, which makes Harry happy because compared to them, Harry’s house has barely scraped by, surviving off mostly Pot Noodle and adrenaline. Meredith’s house has a rooster named Aristotle and _babies_. “Interesting. That’ll soothe Ben’s troubles right over. Does he know you have a doctor with you?” 

“He’s not a doctor,” Harry corrects hastily. “Never finished.” 

“Still.” Meredith ducks her head so Lux can braid the straw over the crown of her hair. “We have a vet, but that’s not the same, is it?” 

Harry shakes his head. Eli reaches up to paw at Harry’s chin with one little hand and Harry’s heart puddles again. He’s so _small_. He’s going to grow up to be as big as Harry, maybe, or even bigger, as big as his dad, but right now he’s the tiniest thing in the whole wide world. 

A fat brown bird with an orange breast settles in the eaves above them and whistles his homely tune. Someday Harry wants to know all the names of the birds, and what kinds of songs they sing. Eli tugs again at a lock of Harry’s hair. He doesn’t mind the sting. He feels like Eli’s tiny fingers are pulling dead debris free from Harry’s limbs, letting hope rush into the clean spaces like wind. 

 

 

Come evening, their new friends offer to put them up for the night in one of the outbuildings or the lounge, but they decline. Harry doesn’t want to think about Nick’s stricken face if he didn’t come home as promised, or how roundly Fiona would whack them about the head for putting everyone through the worry. Gemma might actually come at them in the night with an axe.

They cycle home so light and elated that the halting journey feels like barely twenty minutes before they’re turning into their familiar street, up the darkening road towards the faint orange glow from their windows. The city smells even smokier, dirtier, but Harry’s too full of wanting to care. 

Inside, everyone sprawls around the lounge as normal, a soft song sounding from the gramophone as they play bridge or read or lie staring at the ceiling with their heads in Fiona’s lap, which is apparently what Nick has decided to do with his time. 

The door creaks as it closes and everyone snaps up to look their way. 

“You’re late,” Gemma glares, and then bounds up to hug Harry tightly. “Glad you’re back, Haz.” 

“Nice to see you too, Gem,” Niall snorts, then yelps as Gemma drags him into her as well. 

“Sandwiched by Styleses,” he says, getting his arms around them both. He rubs his fist into Harry's hair, tangling it all up. “Must have sinned in a past life.” 

Harry smiles into Gemma’s shoulder and discreetly pinches Niall in the side. “Hey, Gem, you’ll never guess what we found.” 

“Shh,” Gemma chides, reaching up to pat the top of his head. “We’re having a moment. Be annoying in a minute, please.” 

Harry and Niall obediently let Gemma hug it out. The moment she loosens her arms Niall is talking again. “You will never, ever fucking believe it, the absolute best thing ever, we hit a fucking jackpot —” 

Harry leaves them to it. In the lounge Liam and Louis tilt their heads at him, faces big question marks. On the blue sofa, Zayn and Perrie grin soppily at each other, Perrie tugging at Zayn’s beard. 

“Haz,” Nick says. He props himself up on his elbows, away from Fiona’s lap. Harry doesn’t know how to describe Nick’s expression, but he knows how it makes him feel: warm, and hopeful, and so, so desperately loved. 

“We found something,” Harry says. 

Nick’s face shutters. 

Perrie fishes the Polaroids out of her bag, along with the jar of jam Lou had sent them off with. They had tried to offer something in return, but all they had was a handful of mint humbugs and three tins of tuna. “You’ll pay us back next time,” Lou had said, waving them off, “Karma all evens out in the end. Like water in a glass.”

With a theatrical flourish, Perrie spreads the Polaroids over the coffee table. They wink up like portals to another time, maybe, or another world: the cluster of rough-hewn barns and the big white house; the smiling faces of Lou and Bressie in their hippy throwback clothes, Niall attached to Bressie at the hip like a jolly elven barnacle. 

They explain together about the house and the outbuildings, about the other farm and the people there. They all want to talk at once: Perrie chattering about Leigh-Anne who keeps the goats and Niall ecstatic over a fellow countryman and Harry, who doesn’t think he gets a big enough reaction when he tells them that a _baby_ was born there only seven months ago. 

Harry’s pretty sure he can see the resolve settle into everyone’s bodies: giddy possibility itching in twitching feet and burrowing inside bright eyes. He’s pretty sure, as Perrie lays out the photos and everyone gathers round to examine the multiple chimneys on the main house, that he’s won this. Even Nick is peering down curiously, even if his shoulders are tense and a frown stubbornly indents his forehead. 

Fiona calls the house meeting officially after that. 

The reasons to stay are clear, but delivered without much passion: they have a reliable water source, decent looting capabilities and enough bedrooms. They’re familiar with the area. They’ve been here a year. 

The cons pour out and pile up, drowning the stock answers. The gangs grow stronger every day. Fires eat away at great swaths of the city and terraced houses aren’t sustainable in the long run. The cellar keeps flooding. Even if they keep their house clean and tidy and regularly repaired, they can’t control the rate at which the others start to collapse, which puts them in danger as well. The walls are thin and the rooms are cramped. Cara sleeps in the corridor, and if they want to take in any new people they’d have to sleep in the kitchen or in the bath. There’s not enough space in the garden for livestock. And, someday, the supplies in the city will run out.

After the longest house meeting they have ever had, the vote is seven to three in favour of leaving. Zayn and Fiona want to see the farm themselves before committing fully to the expedition. Nick just stares at his knees. Harry chews his lip, watching him. 

 

 

Nick’s been atypically quiet all evening. Harry’s not sure what to make of it, honestly. 

They crawl into bed, dodging Puppy as always. 

“Would be nice to have a bit more space,” Harry attempts, gingerly. 

“Hm,” Nick says, and that’s not a _no_. He settles back into the pillows, pulling his notebook from the windowsill and starts to scribble. The fat orange moon paints the page in licks of light. 

Perrie didn’t lay out every Polaroid they took downstairs. There’s one leftover, tucked into the back pocket of his jeans. A few more linger back out in the country, pinned in the kitchen of Lou’s farm. Perrie got excited and forgot her mandate to conserve film, too eager to show off to all the new people. At dinner she’d passed the camera around and neither Harry nor Niall stopped her. 

Ben had leaned over to them and nodded at the other end of the table, where a girl named Jesy took a quick shot of Lou holding up two fingers in a peace sign, her mouth squeezed to one side. They both crowed with laughter, crowding around the camera. “You said you have more things like this?” 

Niall had nodded, explaining about their collecting. Ben looked so impressed. Harry couldn’t muster up the willpower to go take the camera from their eager hands. 

So now Harry has one Polaroid tucked in the back pocket of the jeans he wore to the farm, one Polaroid he didn’t hand over to Perrie before they cycled back home. He didn’t want to share it with everyone. It felt special. He pulls the print out now, smooths the buckled plastic, and passes it to Nick. 

Meredith had taken the photo, beaming down at the developing film with abject wonder after she pulled it from the camera. Harry’d felt the same way, watching faces emerge from the glossy grey fog. It was like magic: pulling something out of nothing. 

Harry puts his hand over Nick’s and looks over his shoulder. In the photograph Harry and Lux beam out from inside a warped colourful world. Lux has her arms twined tightly around Harry’s neck and Harry’s laughing, braided hay crown slipping across his forehead. 

“That’s Lux. We told you about her. She’s Lou and Tom’s daughter. There’s her, and there’s the little baby, Eli. He’s only seven months old. They had him at the farm.” 

Nick holds the photograph with cautious fingertips, silent as the night outside. 

“Grim? You all right?” 

Nick nods, sniffing slightly and wiping at his eyes. Harry feels abruptly stupid, because he hadn’t noticed Nick was tearing up. “She’s beautiful,” Nick murmurs, voice hoarse. He smiles down at the photograph. “Look at her little crown. She made you one too?” 

Somebody told Harry once that sun shining through rain is called a fox’s wedding. He can’t remember whether or not it was supposed to be good luck. Maybe it doesn’t matter. They can write their own myths, now. 

Harry rests his chin on Nick’s shoulder and wraps his arms and legs around his stomach like a koala. Lux will never see a koala. Maybe Harry can show her pictures, or find a soft toy in that shop by the tube station before they leave. “Uh-huh. Looks nice, doesn’t it?” 

“Yeah.” 

They’re quiet for a minute, just breathing and looking down at the funny little picture. 

“I have a car,” Nick says finally. “Well — I had a car. The roads are kind of shit, but we could… You need something, for moving, and for emergencies. I don’t… I’m still not, like, completely sold, but we could. We could use it. If you wanted.” 

A car. Harry hadn’t even considered it. A _car._ That would make this unbelievably simpler. They had a car for the first month but it ran out of petrol and they couldn’t find more, so it’s been bicycles ever since. They weave more easily through the blocked up side streets but does it matter how long it would take to thread a car through the obstructed roads if it would save them about fifteen round trips on the bicycles? They wouldn’t have to abandon their collections: the stacks of records, Zayn’s towers of art supplies, Niall’s guitars and the towers of library books. He wiggles a bit, letting some of the giddy energy out. He feels like a kid who’s never been allowed sugar but just ate an entire tin of biscuits at a friend’s house. 

“Does it still have petrol? And run? That would help so much, Grim, you have no idea.” 

“I have some idea,” Nick says, shrugging. He keeps looking down at the Polaroid, thumb tracing the corner. His hands are shaking a little. “And I filled it up before… Before. Dunno how long it takes for petrol to go off, but it’s worth a try, innit?” 

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s really, really worth a try.” Harry thunks his head down on Nick’s shoulder. A _car_. If they can pull this off, if they could find a route through the city, they could move in a day. They could get started now, setting up their new house and dividing the bedrooms and cleaning the rot from the kitchen until the yellow walls shine like new butter. They could play with babies and plant flowers and learn how to milk goats; they could throw off the funeral shroud of city dirt and see what skin lives underneath. 

Blood thrumming and heart in flight, Harry feels alive, alive, alive. 

 

 

 

Primrose Hill edges close on gang territory, so Harry and Nick cycle over in the dark morning, before dawn crests fully over the sky. 

Nick stops in front of a cluster of neat terraced houses, all brick and pastel paint and wrought iron railings. If it weren’t for the rubbish everywhere and the ransacked cars littering the road, it could almost be a normal day. Nick could almost be inviting Harry back to his for lunch and a bit of telly.  

Harry eyes the cars nervously, hoping none of the open vehicles are Nick’s. That’d really fuck with his plans, right about now. He counts six with open doors, and seven more lingering neatly in their spaces as if they were waiting for parking enforcement to rise from the ashes like a bureaucratic saviour and give them credit for staying between the white lines. “Which is yours?” 

“That one.” Nick points down the road towards a black Mercedes spattered in bird shit. The windows, at least, are intact. Next to see if the engine still goes, Harry figures, and starts down the road. Nick doesn’t follow. He’s walking fast towards the houses, keys clutched in one fist. 

Harry rushes after him. “Grim — hey, what are you doing?” 

“I want to get some things from home,” Nick says, going down the steps towards a garden flat two at a time. 

“I’m not sure, Grim, I’m not sure this is a good —”

Nick doesn’t seem to hear him. Harry can only watch helplessly as he unlocks the door and pushes it open. _That’s a good sign_ , Harry thinks, _the locked door_ , but then he stops himself, because the window has been broken wide open. Jagged glass crusts the edges like spikes atop a fence. 

“Nick, don’t —” Harry reaches for his arm but Nick shakes him off, rushing into the flat with a kind of wild hope that frightens Harry to the core. Harry wants to cover that hope up and shelter it like a child in an earthquake. 

Harry knows what comes next. Along the long hallway his shoes scrabble on crushed glass and streaks of mud. Rubbish heaps in corners and slides along the corridor into the open room beyond. If he’s honest, Harry’s seen worse scavenging — there are no bodies, for one, and no one’s smeared shit over the walls — but it doesn’t look like somebody’s flat. It looks like a ruin. 

Nick stands frozen in the centre of the desiccated lounge and lets out a small, broken sound that pierces Harry’s heart right through. 

“It was nice when I left,” Nick whispers, looking from the broken mirror in the conservatory to the straw nests in the chandelier and the bird shit all over the dining table. “I left it, ‘cos I’d gone to my friend’s house, and it was all nice. I’d just tidied.” 

Harry tries to conjure it up, that nice tidy flat. Lovely knick-knacks scatter in pieces all over, old prints and framed butterflies. They’re a jigsaw of a really beautiful life. 

Nick seems almost confused, like maybe he’s just stumbled into the wrong flat by mistake and he should check the next door down. Or like he’s waiting for someone to come in and tell him, “April Fools.” Harry chews his lip into stringy threads and watches. His heart feels like a black fly buzzing blindly through someone’s bedroom, trapped, waiting for the smack of a magazine to fall. 

The glass roof of the conservatory has broken along one side and green edges its way inside. A crow dives through and perches on the back of a straight back chair, the sort of bird that existed far before humans and will live on long after. His oil slick wings glint in the morning light and he tilts his head as if to ask _who are you_? 

Swathed in shock like a swaddled child, Nick picks up a broken frame and shakes the glass off. He stares inside for a long moment, glasses slipping down his nose in the still room. 

Harry waits, heart beating against the walls. 

Nick leans forward and heaves out a bone-rattling sob, folding up like rice paper in the rain. He sinks, hands over his face, and Harry rushes to take him into his arms before he gets glass all over his knees. Nick goes easy, letting Harry tip them over onto one of the gnawed-through sofas. Harry pulls Nick to his chest and lets him cry there, soaking Harry’s jumper through with hacking sobs. 

Nick’s voice is garbled with tears and snot but eventually Harry can just hear him. “Gone,” Nick is choking, over and over, “It’s all gone, they’re all gone.” 

In the photograph, Nick Before has arms draped over a woman with bright hair. They pose in a big group in the conservatory. Nick Before’s smile is so big it should look fake, but it doesn’t. 

The box of sad things in Harry’s chest tips open. He feels it all: magnetic poetry on a refrigerator in Shoreditch, _I believe women were made in Chicago_ ; soft toys mouldering by a vacant swing-set; party photographs on a girl’s bedroom mirror where the bubbly print along the side said _friends forever_. His mother’s hairpins clustering in coat pockets. Harry drips tears into Nick’s hair and he holds so tight, feeling every bone in Nick’s shaking back under his fingertips. 

The crow hasn’t budged from his chair. He examines them with dispassionate eyes, lizard cold. His name comes to Harry in a rush: Carrion Crow. _What do you know_ , Harry thinks savagely, stupidly protective. _What do you know what’s right_. 

Nick isn’t a pretty crier. He cries like he’s sailing through a hurricane, mouth open and eyes red. Harry holds on. There’s nothing he can say, nothing he can do but sit with him and stroke his hair and murmur stupid, meaningless things like, “I’m here,” and, “I’m so sorry,” until the storm dies down. 

Eventually it does, and Nick’s just breathing into Harry’s jumper. Harry kisses the top of his head and swears to whatever god is still listening that this is enough now. They’ve seen enough, now. They get to be happy next. That’s how it needs to go. 

Harry forces the lid back onto the box in his chest. Not every box has to be like Pandora’s and anyway, Harry’s too busy. He has a new world to grow. 

The crow stares him down and Harry stares right back. The contest ends as the crow takes off in an iridescent rush, disappearing through the shattered ceiling. The crow will be back, but when he is, they’ll be gone. 

“Sorry,” Nick whispers finally, voice completely shot. He sounds like he’s been drinking, or sucking cock, or something else nice and not so… Sobbing in the ruins of his old home. 

“Don’t you dare,” Harry says, bending down to kiss over Nick’s forehead and down over his puffy eyes and finally his mouth. “Don’t be sorry, don’t fucking be sorry.” 

Nick looks almost like he’s going to start crying again but he takes a breath, and the look passes. 

“Let’s pack a bag,” Harry says, wiping Nick’s face. “Okay, love? Let’s pack a bag, and check your car, and go… Go home.” 

Nick sits up, wiping his face. “Yeah,” he agrees, looking at his old flat like he’s lost. “Yeah… We can. Okay.” 

Harry kisses his cheek harder than cheek kisses should usually be, probably, but that’s how he feels. He feels violently loving; he feels murderously fond. He feels like he could fuck somebody’s shit up if they tried to mess with him right now. He wishes they had someone to blame for all this, but they don’t. 

He wants more than ever to leave London. They have to escape this graveyard and start anew. 

Harry kisses Nick’s cheek again and holds his lips there, the warmth of Nick’s skin seeping through his body. Nick moves until he finds Harry’s mouth, clenches his fists in Harry’s jumper and holds on. Harry cups Nick’s face in both hands and kisses him hard, teeth and tongue. He wants to climb into Nick’s body and never come out. He wants to light him up from the inside out. He’s on Nick’s lap before he notices the motion, heavy breath spilling from their mouths as their hips grind jagged over each other. 

“Fuck, Harry,” Nick gasps, “I want — I want —”

Harry wants too. Harry wants _so_ much. Harry wants to fuck Nick into the floor, wants to swallow him down until he chokes, wants to make Nick forget his name, forget this address, forget everything that happened before. He wants Nick to forget everything that isn’t him. If that’s a little psychotic, he doesn’t care.  

Morning light spills over the ruined floor in long pale streaks. They have to leave soon. “Later,” Harry promises, running his thumbs along Nick’s cheekbones a little roughly. He bends down to kiss Nick again. “Later, I swear.” 

Nick blinks up at him, mouth swollen. 

“Stay here, love,” Harry tells Nick. “I’ll pack.” 

Nick looks slowly around the room and Harry knows that was the right division of labour. Harry finds a weekender bag in Nick’s bedroom and packs sturdy clothes and boots and photos of what must be Nick’s family, and a few of his friends. He doesn’t know who is important and who isn’t. He makes guesses based on where the photos were kept. Nick’s got a stash of fancy candles in the en suite and Harry loads those up. There’s nothing in the kitchen of value at all; it was clearly already ransacked by whoever smashed the windows up.  

When he comes out into the lounge Nick is standing again. He looks more present. “Let’s go,” Nick says, hoarse but steady. He leads Harry down the hallway and up onto the street, not looking back. 

The Mercedes is wedged neatly next to another still car, the pair of them preserved from Before like bugs in amber. 

“Car looks okay,” Harry says, eying it. He slings the duffle down to the pavement and checks all the sides, nudges at the tyres with his feet. 

Harry jumps back at the the sound of the doors unlocking, the beep unnaturally loud in the still morning. “Holy shit,” he says, hand to his heart. “What the fuck.”He hasn’t heard anything beep in… However long it’s been. 

Nick snorts. “Graceful,” he says, pulling the driver’s door open and easing onto the seat. “Well. Let’s… let’s not blow up, shall we? You stand a little… further back.” 

Harry has no intention of doing so, and stays where he is as Nick starts the car. The engine turns over with a wheezy rattle, struggling to remember what it was built for. Eventually, though, it’s running. 

“Haz.” Nick runs his hands over the dashboard, leaving streaks in the dust. He coughs and ducks back out into the street to breathe. “Haz, come in. Shit, I’ve got CDs in. C’mon, there’s heat, let’s go, let’s not waste it.” 

Harry crams their bicycles into the backseat faster than is possibly wise and takes the passenger’s side. The seat leather feels unbelievable under his skin. He lets out a groan that wouldn’t sound out of place in porn. 

Nick’s car has that electric heat Harry has all but forgotten, the warmth that comes without a side of smoke, and actual contemporary music playing over the speakers. Miley Cyrus. He could cry. He almost cries, only he’s too happy to be out of the ruin of Nick’s flat and in an actual, working vehicle. 

“I think I’m having a religious experience set to Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball,” Nick says, forehead resting against the wheel. 

“Right there with you,” Harry agrees. He shucks his shoes and socks to press his bare feet to the heat vents. “H _oooo_ ly shit. Oh my god.” 

“Harold!” Nick rockets back from the wheel so fast he hits his head on the seat. “ _Please_ take your sweaty feet off of my nice car. _Ah,_ god, that’s disgusting, I’m going to be sick.” 

“No, Grim, you have to try this.” Harry wriggles into a more comfortable position, toes spread out. “I think this is the first time my toes have been warm in, like, a year.” 

“But it _smells,_ ” Nick whines, batting at Harry’s legs. 

Harry really wants to be a little shit and keep on doing this until Nick has a nervous breakdown, but he’s sort of seen enough by way of nervous breakdown from Nick today and he _really_ doesn’t fancy dealing with the Camden Gang this morning. Later, he’ll be a little shit. When they’re safe. 

“We’ve got to go silently out,” Harry says, taking his feet down from the vents. “Just in case. Like in Sound of Music, with the Nazis.” 

“You’re very odd,” Nick informs him, but he does exactly what they did in Sound of Music and they glide ghost-like down the street in the dim morning light, weaving around stalled cars. Nick can’t be going more than fifteen miles an hour but Harry feels like they’re racing. 

Once they’re in Hampstead Harry cranks up the music. He and Nick sing loudly, remembering all the words without missing a beat and it feels like — if it weren’t for the abandoned cars on the road, the burnt husks of buildings, the vacant pavement — like normal. Like Before. 

Harry grabs Nick’s hand and Nick smiles, those little crinkles by his eyes doing joyful things to Harry’s insides. “I’m glad you’re here,” Harry says. “I’m really, really glad.” 

Nick goes pink and pleased and a little choked up. He doesn’t look at Harry directly, which is Nick’s way of saying _you too_ , Harry’s pretty sure. 

 

 

Their housemates welcome them home like conquering heroes and kindly don’t mention Nick’s shot voice or his red eyes. Fiona doesn’t protest when Nick flops down onto the sofa and presses his face to her knee, just pets his hair and nods the rest of them off. She looks at Harry, eyebrow raised, and Harry does his best to convey the situation with his face and some muted, ill-suited charades. 

Gemma wants to see the car, so Harry takes the keys from the coffee table and leads her outside.  

“Posh,” she says approvingly, circling the tyres. 

Harry shrugs and unlocks the doors. “Nice inside, too.” 

“Maybe we can find petrol out there, for emergencies and all.” Gemma slides over the leather of the back seat and stares up at the roof of the car. 

“Never mind that, we can move in a _day_ now,” Harry says, inspecting the boot. “Load all the supplies in here, and everyone can cycle out. Could go any time.” 

“You’ll have to convince everyone of that first, Haz.” 

Harry shrugs. “Just Nick, now, I think. Fiona and Zayn have changed their votes. Right?” _And I don’t think Nick needs much convincing_ , he thinks but doesn’t say. 

Gemma hums in vague agreement. “Where did you go today? Where was his car?” 

“His old flat.” Harry shuts the boot and slides into the passenger’s seat to ruffle through the glovebox. “He hadn’t been back since… Since everything.” 

“Must have been hard.” 

“Yeah.” Harry doesn’t go into it. He’d like to talk to Gemma about how it had felt, holding Nick there, but the swell of tenderness and the way Nick held on feel too private to be able to explain. 

With light fingers, Gemma traces the roof of the car. “Do you ever think about going home?” 

Harry knows Gemma doesn’t mean their old flat in South London, surrounded by high water by now. When they left murky puddles had been rushing in from the river: two, three feet deep. Harry didn’t mind leaving it. They would have drowned there. He’s never minded leaving anywhere, but he supposes it’s different when you can never go back. Sometimes he can barely believe that he can’t just get on a train and go north, have his mum pick him up at the station and take him home to eat cheese toasties and watch Love Actually. 

Harry tucks his legs up under his chin, chest tight. “I try not to.” 

“We can’t, obviously. I just… I wonder, sometimes.” Gemma’s wildflower hair tumbles over her face, obscuring her eyes. Harry wonders if she’ll ever cut it or just let it grow, the bleached ends trailing further and further towards the ground. 

“It’s probably like everywhere else,” Harry says. “Rotting a bit. Maybe not so ransacked, since it’s more remote.” Harry traces the dashboard and imagines him and Gemma driving up to Cheshire and walking in their front door, going to sleep in their childhood beds. It’d be suicide, and pointless beside, but… still. 

Gemma brushes her hair out of her face and sits up, wiping her palms on her jeans. “Well. At least we know what happened to everyone. Mum and Dad and Robin. No loose ends.” Gemma nods, sharp, like she’s running scissors along the border of her own life to make sure that she’s right. 

Harry has no idea what happened to their cousins or most of his friends, but he knows what she means. They got to say goodbye, mostly. He can’t imagine being Niall or Louis, and not knowing. Suspecting. He reaches his hand back between the front seats and Gemma takes it. “Love you,” he says, eyes watering. He looks straight ahead, like he’s on the open road. 

“Love you too, Haz,” she says, and squeezes their fingers together.

 

 

Fiona heats up soup for their tea. Nick is meant to help but spends much of the time making a nuisance of himself whilst Fiona sighs loudly and smacks him about the head. All through dinner the new house is all they can talk about: which bedroom will go to whom, where they could find some chickens, wondering how many other small farms like Lou’s are scattered quietly around the country. Nick doesn’t say much but smiles, nods. 

Harry allows his insides to fill with bright hope, picturing big meals with both of their houses together, kids running around outside. 

Everyone filters into the lounge after they finish except Harry, who has washing-up duty, and Nick, who lingers behind. Harry turns around to ask him if he’s thought more about moving, but Nick doesn’t let Harry finish, just turns him round by the hips and kisses him, fingers light on Harry’s jaw. Dizzy birds beat where Harry’s heart usually lives. 

Nick pulls back, rests their foreheads together. His eyelashes are so, so long, and the skin at the corner of his eyes crinkles up. 

“You can have anything,” Harry whispers, thinking of Nick in that ruined flat. “Anything.” 

Nick slides his eyes shut. They stand together, an orbit of two. The thin skin of his eyelids flutters. “Fuck me,” he says, low. 

Harry nods and leads him upstairs. 

Nick’s so lanky and tall that it’s almost surprising, how easily Harry can press him into the mattress and pin him by his spindly wrists. 

Nick looks up at him, mouth hanging half-open. Harry feels _immense_. He feels like he used to, Before, when he’d be out to pull in a dark club or loud house party and some tall girl or bearded bloke would smile just right or tilt their body towards Harry’s and Harry would know for sure that they’d be coming home with him. It feels like that, only over and over again: a constant cocaine surge. 

 _I’m in love with you_ , Harry thinks, as he bends down to kiss Nick’s swollen mouth. _Never look at anyone but me again._

“All this caveman business is very laddy of you,” Nick gasps, smirk unravelling at the corners. 

“I’m very laddy,” Harry says. He lets go of Nick’s wrists so he can get both their jumpers off, tossing his to the side before carefully manoeuvring the collar of Nick’s over his oddly gigantic cranium. Harry sits up again to survey the open skin, imagining the ribby plane of Nick’s chest as his kingdom. It’s his kingdom, and he can do what he wants with it. Plant some flowers, maybe, or graze tiny goats. Harry runs his fingers through Nick’s chest hair, and bends to take one of his nipples into his mouth. 

“Oi,” Nick says, whacking at Harry’s head when he bites. “I don’t like that as much as you, dairy creature.” 

“Must like it some.” Harry reaches down between them and palms Nick’s cock. 

“Not from _that_ ,” Nick whines, and he’s definitely about to go on whinging about Harry’s technique so Harry flips him over and yanks his pants away from his bum. Nick’s bum may be small, but there’s a really nice symmetrical roundness to it, and the skin feels so good under his hands. He measures his palms against Nick’s cheeks and squeezes a bit, satisfied. His hands look big over the flesh. Manly, and shit. Hands that can do things. Build barns, hold babies, play guitar. Helpful hands. 

“What are you dawdling for, Styles,” Nick mumbles into the pillow. His arse twitches up towards Harry, belying the tone. 

Harry smirks, squeezing a bit more. “Why, did you want something?” 

Nick groans a little. “I hate you.” 

“You don’t.” Harry grins. He’s pretty sure Nick _really_ doesn’t. He’s pretty sure Nick loves him. Can’t know these things definitely, though, and he’d really like to seal that particular deal so he pulls Nick’s hips up and gets his mouth down, licking over his hole. They had a bath not an hour ago. It’d be a shame to waste the opportunity. Nick whines, back arching. 

There’s something mindlessly satisfying about the weight of Nick’s arse in Harry’s face. He likes that, and the twitches of his hole under Harry’s tongue and the whining, breathless sounds Nick makes into the pillow. Nick fists the blankets and squirms like he’s trying not to float off the bed. Harry likes Nick’s punched-out wheeze when Harry spanks his flank a little. _Love me best_ , Harry licks and bites and sucks around his rim. _Love me best._

 _“Fuck,_ Haz,” Nick pants. “Just — fuck me, please.” 

Harry’s a very polite boy. He responds very well to polite requests, especially when the polite request is exactly what he wants to do. He fumbles around for the lube and drops it, nearly losing the bottle down the side of the bed but retrieving it in time. 

“No fingers.” Nick tilts his arse back and stares at Harry over his shoulder. Harry gets his fingers around his cock to relieve some of the pressure. Nick looks completely wrecked. 

Harry did that. Harry made him look like that. 

Nick reaches back for Harry’s knee, fingers scrabbling for the skin. “Just do it. Please” 

“You sure?” 

“Fucking _do it_ , Harry,” Nick demands, and Harry rushes to roll a condom over his prick and stroke lube over himself. When he’s sorted, Harry palms the long line of Nick’s back, hips to waist to shoulders, then tilts Nick’s face so he can kiss him carefully. Nick whimpers low, Harry’s cock bumping up between his legs. 

Harry can’t look away from the sight of his cock sinking into Nick’s body. He holds Nick’s arse open for a better view, nearly nutting himself at the way Nick’s hole stretches slowly over the girth of Harry’s cock and sucks him down as Harry presses slowly into him. Nick’s so good inside, so warm and unbelievably tight and takes him so well. How do things exist in the world that feel this fucking good? 

“This okay?” Harry asks, breathless, trembling with the effort to stay still. 

Nick’s hands twist in the bedsheets and he shifts his hips up, grinding back towards Harry. “Yeah. Yeah, go on, move.” 

Harry does, slowly at first and then faster, drinking in the freckled expanse of Nick’s back and his tight arse and the half-opened pink of his mouth when he turns his head to the side and pants into the evening air. 

He needs to see Nick’s face. 

Harry pulls out and Nick protests, groping backwards for him. “What the fuck,” Nick whines, fingers like grabby spiders. “You arsehole I need —”

“Shh,” Harry soothes, almost laughing. He just looks so _petulant_. Harry nudges Nick around by the hips so they can look at each other face-to-face. Harry kisses the protests from Nick’s mouth, bearing them both down into the bed until they’re moving so slow and slick, still kissing as Harry shifts Nick’s legs up and fumbles his cock until he can sink back inside. He wants to tell Nick how it feels — _like coming home_ — but he knows that’s cheesy and a bit stupid, so he just kisses the thought into him, drives in slow and holds Nick’s face with both hands and strokes the line of his cheekbones. 

 _Don’t ever leave me_ , Harry thinks, as Nick gasps and tilts his head back. _You’re not allowed to leave me_. He wishes that he hadn’t used a condom. He wants to come inside Nick; he wants to fill him up, and he may be saying all that out loud if Nick’s clawing at his back and gasping, “Yes,” is any indication. 

Harry goes faster, harder, fucking him as deep as he can go. Nick’s groaning low, mouth open. He doesn’t look away from Harry’s face and the singular focus rings so bone-deep satisfying Harry might come from that alone. 

“Fucking love this,” Harry tells him, covering Nick’s body with his own, “You feel so fucking good, Nick, want to fuck you forever, want to make you come.” 

“Yes, please, _fuck_ , Harry, you’re so —”

Harry doesn’t find out what he’s so. Nick comes then, fisting his dick and gasping high in the back of his throat. The squeeze of him sets Harry’s belly coiling and he follows in a few aborted thrusts, burying his head in Nick’s shoulder as Nick strokes his back through the aftershocks. 

Harry breathes Nick’s skin, cock twitching inside of him still. He’s never felt like this before. He’s never wanted someone this much. 

“I’d stay with you,” Harry whispers. He should pull out but he stays where he is, oversensitive and softening. “If you needed to stay, I’d stay with you.” 

Nick is quiet, hands frozen on Harry’s back. He eases himself out from underneath the splay of Harry’s body and off of Harry’s dick, reaching down to keep the condom in place. Nick takes care of the condom, tying it neatly and putting it on the windowsill like a modern art display. 

“I would,” Harry continues, wondering if he missed a step like falling down the stairs in the dark. His stomach swoops like that, like the floor might not be where he thinks it is. He peers up at Nick. “I would.” 

Nick shakes his head, eyes bright. “I wouldn’t — I wouldn’t make you do that. I wouldn’t make you leave your sister, your… You were right, Haz. We have to go. There’s nothing left here.” 

Harry shimmies up until he can twine around Nick’s middle, pulling him down into the nest of their bed. “It’ll be nice,” Harry swears, burrowing into Nick’s chest. “I promise it’ll be nice.” 

 _It’ll be nice:_ a promise so hollow Nick could press his ear to it and hear the sea. Harry doesn’t care; he’s going to fill that promise up with dirt and seeds and grow tomatoes. He’s going to figure out how to make curry sauce out of that promise; he’s going to get sunburnt weeding that promise; he’s going to get that promise under his nails and into his skin. 

“Okay, Harold,” Nick says. “Let’s get out of town.” 

 

 

In the morning Harry and Liam pack the car like playing tetris. Niall, whose knee has been acting up lately, is to drive it out with Puppy onboard. Everyone else will follow on bicycles with the remainder of their belongings strapped to the frames. 

By mid-morning everything is sorted and they stand together in the nearly empty lounge, hydrating a bit before the journey. They’re all quiet, sipping water. 

“We should go soon,” Fiona says, but nobody makes a move. 

Nick digs around in his pocket, then twists his key ring until his car keys separate from the pack. He tosses those to Niall, then puts his house keys on the coffee table. He looks down at them for a moment, face unreadable, and leaves through the front door. 

Gemma follows suit, and Fiona, and then they’re all placing their old house keys around the coffee table in a circle of mismatched bundles. Nick’s spare silver ring; Cara’s unwieldy handful of house keys and family keys and lockbox keys and gaudy glitter dice keychains dangling from the loop; the pale blue lanyard that was once Perrie’s; plastic logos from Zayn’s uni and heavy, industrial-looking work keys on Fiona’s weighty keyring. One by one they leave their keys on the table and disappear, until it’s just Harry and Niall. Harry fingers the familiar metal rattle for a moment and then lets his handful fall to rest with the others. He doesn’t need them. None of them need these anymore. 

Harry follows Niall out into the bright sunlight. Their housemates stand in a loose cluster looking up at the house, squinting in the brightness. Harry thinks it’s quite beautiful. He’s glad they lived there.

No one officially says that it’s time, but Harry can feel the moment shift as quickly if they’d been given orders. They all disperse, picking up their bicycles and patting down their belongings and making sure Niall’s bicycle is strapped securely to Nick’s car. 

One by one, they leave. Harry doesn’t look back.

 

  

**Epilogue**

 

_Here are some words you’ll never need:_ _nuclear, expat, tabloid, passion fruit, Tory, lightbulb, Facebook, wireless, traffic, office._

_(You might want to learn those words if you read a lot but I think your life will be ok not using them much.)_

_Here are some words you’ll know better than I do_ _: lambing, foxes, soil, harvest, compost, lapwing, spindle, crab apple, plough._

_(You might already know those words better than me. That’s depressing. You put a thimble up your nose yesterday.)_

_In the old world, we were scared of a lot of things that turned out not to be so scary, like spiders. I don’t think you’ll be afraid of spiders. That’s good. It’ll save you a lot of screeching, and also spare you from the mockery (your dad is the true villain in this)._

_You’ll want to ask me about the old world, I think, but I don’t want to talk about What Happened Before. It was horrible, okay? I’m sorry. Ask one of your aunties._

_Once upon a time, your bedtime songs were played on something called a radio. A radio was like a pal you could keep next to you during your day, and they’d talk about their lives and play records. That’s what I did, Before. Now I talk to you._

_This is the one lesson: in the end we all want the same things. Food, water, shelter. Family._

_I’m glad I finally met you._

**Author's Note:**

> The inspiration for Nick's notebook came from a poem by Sarah Lang called "For Tamara." Apocalypse Song has a tumblr tag that lives [here](http://waspabi.tumblr.com/tagged/apocalypse-song).


End file.
